Two weekends ago we camped at Bruneau Dunes, which opens its observatory Friday & Saturday evenings after 8:30PM.
Even though the moon was overwhelmingly bright we saw the moons of Jupiter and “The Ring Nebula” M57.
While M57 doesn’t really look so colorful when seen through Bruneau’s telescope as it does on Wikipedia (right), I saw its light with my own eyes, filtered only by glass, a lot of nothing, & dust.
Standing in line for the big scope isn’t a dream (it’s a bit stuffy & dark in the building, and it took about 20 minutes) and while I was there I overheard:
“If they were smart they’d just put a big TV up on the wall.”
and
“Let’s go, we can look at this online.”
(And they left.)
I respect the work being done to let us view the cosmos through computers & TV (World Wide Telescope, for example), and I realize not everyone has access to such a telescope, but when you do, wait for it. Let the light from these perhaps long-gone places soak straight into your brain through your eyeballs and see what happens. 20 minutes is not too high a price for amazement.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I use to grumble about people being lazy, then I realized it was better to have them home on their couch rather than clogging up my trails. You could have placated them with your phone, but we are all better off having these folk never leave their house again. We almost went to the Dunes yesterday.
I decided to grumble anyway in this case, because it’s like my employer invented the couch, and it’s so great that people are out doing marketing for it to otherwise non-lazy people. I’m conflicted about that aspect.
When a store has double doors why do they only let you use one of them?
Бороться с органом. Подождите, пока кто-то выйти в другие двери, а затем проникнуть. Найти ваши идеи увлекательное, и я хотел бы подписаться на бюллетень.
It was just like a beartiful eye .I really wonder how colourful it can be.