Good night, Moon.

[pyat]

Lots of stuff going on today. Visited an old friend and his wife, and their two kids. Took velvetpage's father to supper. Went shopping, and ran into bandersnitch.


Elizabeth got a special treat tonight because she cleaned the backroom. She stayed up till 10:30, and we went star gazing. The telescope is a $20 Vivitar 50mm, basically the cheapest "real" telescope on the market. It's not a toy, but it's a lot more useful for spying on neighbours than stargazing. However, you can see the bands of Jupiter's cloud cover, and you can see Saturn's rings, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

It came with a ridculously light aluminum tripod that wobbled for 20 or 30 seconds anytime I adjusted the telescope position. I swapped it out with a old solid camera tripod I got at a thrift store.


Moon-gazing, mostly. And yes, it was mostly a matter of sitting in a dark yard, being dined on by mosquitos while I fiddled with the telescope. But she seemed to like it.


We got some nice views of the Moon, and... er... a star. A bright one, nearly overhead. I did attempt from photography through the telescope, but this is a fussy business without the right tools, and even fussier when you have an excited 6 year old nearby, poking at the telescope and jogging your elbow. This was the best I got.


Elizabeth wanted to make a creepy photo.

While examining the star, a satellite or faint meteor zipped through the field of view. It was not the ISS, as I'd checked the times it would be visible from Hamilton. That experience, of peering at this tiny circle of sky just as something went darting past, was very cool.

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