Telescopes

For Christmas, I bought Sarah a telescope because she'd expressed a great deal of interest in them. Knowing absolutely nothing about them, I ended up getting what's called a 6" dobsonian - here's what it looks like. It's supposed to be a good starter telescope, and has a gizmo that tells you where to point it to find all sorts of neat stuff. We've not used it very much, but tonight Jupiter was right out in our backyard and it wasn't at 4 am, so we broke it out and took a peek. It was pretty neat - we could see a bunch of it's moons and the bands of color across the planet. Sarah really likes it when we take it out and point it at the moon - the telescope's really not rigged to be able to take pictures with it, but on a whim I pointed my camera as best I could through the lens and tried to take a picture, and it worked out pretty well. It doesn't do any of the fancy tracking or have many bells or whistles on it, but if she enjoys it and wants to do more with it, then we can look for something else that does more. I had no idea there were so many types of telescopes out there - I had a really hard time finding the appropriate one there was so many of them. This picture is using the weakest magnification we have on it - if we dial it up to 'super duper', we can see all sorts of crazy cool things on the moon.

Today we went up to a place called the crystal caverns, which is a big cavern with, erm, crystals in it...(where DO they come up with these names??). Sarah really enjoyed it and afterwards all she could talk about was wanting to get a rock tumbler. The whole time I was down there I kept thinking 'man, what a GREAT place to put a wine cellar..."