The Stars, Like Dust

Regarding hobbies, I'm not dedicated -- I'm a dabbler.  An example is the dog show thing, which came and went in about 9 months, which was fine with me.

Our house on Grant Street had a single-story family room at the back with a flat roof.  Our bedroom opened up onto this roof, so we eventually built a deck on top.  This provided a much better view of the night sky, which piqued my interest in astronomy, which led me to get a couple of books, which ultimately got me a telescope as a Father's Day present one year.

Looking up at the night sky can take your thoughts in a number of different directions, including "I'm seeing the same thing that people have seen at night for thousands of years...."  The ancients connected the stars to their mythologies, of course, and these varied from place to place.  A favorite trivia tidbit of mine is that the star cluster we call the Pleiades was associated by the Greeks with the "Seven Sisters", the seven daughters of Atlas; various Indian tribes had other stories about maidens or orphans, while the Japanese called this grouping of stars "unity", which in Japanese is "Subaru".   Think of that the next time you see the logo for that car company...

The other thing that got me into astronomy was our place in Lake Geneva.  Here in Evanston you can always tell which way Chicago is at night by the glow in the sky.  That's great for knowing directions, but not great ("light pollution") for stargazing.  The clear, dark Wisconsin sky gives awesome detail; the Milky Way is easily seen, a band of thousands of visible stars stretched across the sky from east to west.  It wasn't too long after getting my telescope that I took it up to Lake Geneva, and I've kept it there since.

The telescope is about 3 feet long and 6 inches in diameter, mounted on a tripod.  The lens-and-mirror setup lets you observe through an eyepiece that's perpendicular to the body.  It also has a couple of small motors and a computer of sorts that allows you (theoretically) to select the star you want to view and have it find and point automatically.  I've never gotten that working right, and gave up years ago, since relying on just moving it manually.

On a summer night up north I'll set up on the lawn right outside the condo, not too close to the golf course (to avoid the sprinklers).  If the kids (ours or anyone else's) want to see I'll set a plastic lawn chair next to the telescope for them to stand on.  The rule is that they have to hold their hands behind their backs and then look down through the eyepiece; otherwise they tend to bump it and lose whatever we were trying to see.  Sometimes I'll have a line of 5 or more waiting their turn.  I have to re-adjust between kids, as the field of view keeps moving (Earth's rotation and all that.)

My favorite things to look at are the Moon and the planets Jupiter and Saturn.  In general I find that a star that appears to the naked eye like a dot of light looks, with the telescope, like... a bigger dot of light.  But those three closer objects are really something, even with my amateur tools and skill.  Here are some pictures I found online that are pretty representative of what you can see:

Moon

Jupiter

Saturn

With Jupiter you can also see several dots of light nearby (not shown in the picture above); those are the Galilean moons, the four biggest of Jupiter's dozens of moons, discovered by Galileo way back when.  These move around Jupiter quickly, so they'll be in different positions from night to night.

The adults will do a little gazing, too.  The typical adult response to seeing the detail in Jupiter or Saturn is "That's SO COOL!"  (Of course, on a summer night in Lake Geneva at Telescope Time the typical adult has already had a few cocktails.)

Early on I had memorized a couple of dozen constellations and stars, but I've forgotten quite a few since.  Maybe I'll get back into it this summer, and see what else is up there worth looking at.

Then again, maybe not.  As I said, I'm a dabbler.

Pat