6/18/06
On Saturday night raddidge and I observed the heavens. First we looked at Saturn and Mars which were very close to each other. If you want to find them in the next couple of nights, look for the pair of lights to the west about a half hour after sunset. The brighter light is Saturn and the dimmer one is Mars.

Saturn remains something remarkable through a telescope along with one or two moons. Sadly Mars is just a ruddy point that pales beside most of the stars in the sky. Jupiter is always good to watch because it's so large. Tonight we saw all four of the Galilean moons. With Starry Night Backyard I saw that there was going to be a brief transit of one of the moons across Jupiter's face but Jupiter would've set long before that moon made its way past its parent planet.

The Andromeda Galaxy was still well below the horizon and wouldn't be worth viewing until two or three in the morning. Seems the best viewing time is in the autumn. Later we observed Vega, Antares, Polaris, Mizar and Alcor. Plus we looked at the Beehive Cluster which has been very close to Saturn for the past couple of months.

I didn't attempt any pictures since the jerry-rigged digital camera butted up against the telescope eyepiece seems to only work with large things like the moon. Plus I don't have that UWAL-F adaptor for my webcam so I can do some digital photography.

Trust me, you'll be the second to know once I'm able to take decent shots of the night sky. raddidge will be the first.

Saturday morning I woke up when my fan turned itself back on. Sometime in the morning someone had cut the power to my apartment or the entire house. I know the laundry room door was double locked so no one could've come in and futzed with the fusebox without the key. When I did go upstairs and investigate, I saw that the fusebox door was wide open. Dunno if Olympics Guy was the culprit or the new girl living in the old Bird apartment.

Late Saturday night, raddidge and I went to the store to pick up a travel alarm clock. Now that I have to reset all my clocks, I want to have one clock that's off the grid so in case of another power outage I won't be fucked and oversleep missing part of work and losing whatever accumulated brownie points or goodwill that remain in my karmic bank.

Everything is good. raddidge is starting to fall asleep, Spot's getting ready to settle down for a short summer night's nap and before I hit the hay I'm going to check on my root beer to see it's cold enough to wet my whistle.