I might be a little addicted to astronomy right now...

I tried out a new recipe for baked eggs with spinach and mushrooms last weekend, only I didn’t have spinach so I substituted Chinese cabbage. Gooood stuff let me tell you! I LOVE it when I find recipes that I can make out here without too much scrambling and substituting, and just to round out the win of this dish, it’s gluten free AND good for you!

Not much has happened on the knitting front, but I will say that I’m trying out a new type of crochet project that has been a pleasant challenge for me. Also, it’s a sock yarn stash buster—very important in my life! Pictures will hopefully follow next week depending on how much I get accomplished.

Wednesday was a full moon, and I wanted to take my kids out to look at it through the telescope, but what with one thing and another it just didn’t work out. I continued my efforts to take even half-way decent pictures of the moon, and ended up with something that utterly does NOT capture the golden magnificence of the rising moon.

Well, last night I arranged with the dorm parents to let the kids come out for a look after music night, so I took the telescope out to practice a bit while I waited for the moon to rise. I decided to give Jupiter another look as the moon was not on that side of the sky, and I found to my delight that I could see four of its moons, and when I got still enough the bands of color across its surface. Now, the planet itself was the size of a small pill, but I was thrilled that I could see even that much. Now I know how Galileo must have felt when he first saw those very same moons all those years ago. I tried to take a picture of it through the eye piece; you can just see the brightest moon. I’ll have to explore the photography options with this telescope; my camera isn’t compatible with the system that is built in.

A little later, I tried taking pictures of the moon through the eye piece, and while the results are not as nice as what the eye can see, I was still amazed at how much was visible!

As I’m learning, it takes a lot of patience to make a hobby of amateur astronomy, but I am having a blast with it right now! I’m glad I had the seniors come out to look last night; the rather chaotic experience will help me plan a better star gazing tour a little later in the term when the moon has waned sufficiently for the constellations to show up again. I just hope these kids catch a little of my enjoyment, and have some good memories of this unit.