Well, just a personal reminiscence from a couple of hours ago.
I do try to pay attention to ‘once in a lifetime’ or maybe every few year events. I’m a big fan of the America’s Cup for instance and never fail to watch the coverage. I am also a big sucker for astronomy and as a matter of fact my homebrewing friend has keys to an observatory with a real live jive telescope.
They even have a dome.
Of course you can’t heat an observatory (warps the optics, creates heat waves out the observation slit, and who wants to pay the bill even if you were willing to be that environmentally incorrect?) and it’s inconvenient to hook up sometimes, so most of my observations are by eye.
If you know where to look there’s a lot to see.
It’s hard to miss something obvious like a lunar eclipse unless you’re busy blogging. Even the pollution from the driveway lights can’t hide it. Planets like Saturn and bright stars like Regulus are pretty visible too if you know where they are (planets are noticeably non-blinking and look… rounder than stars).
Meteors are a little tougher to convince yourself you’re seeing. They’re mostly not streaky at all. Instead they look like stars, maybe just a little redder. What you notice is that they seem to wander, and at first you’re saying- nah, just my eyes. You need to frame them against a fixed object (like the side of a house or a tree branch, although real stars will do) and then you find that they really dart around quite a bit.
The tell tale is that they’ll get fuzzy every once in a while, like really fizzling bad fireworks.
Not much else to see, so once you have it’s always the same. That can be a disappointment like so much astronomy, NASA pictures really are much better than real life in part because they capture hours worth of photons and your eyes are instantaneous.
Still, saw me a shot down spy satellite tonight. No telling when that will happen again.
