You have a great job, RL, to be able to get insider access to facilities like Lick, not to mention your own Keck. I've also found most scientists enthusiastic about sharing. Government and particularly NASA scientists are a little more reserved, but even so I've found that with a little patience and a lot of respect they'll open up. Back when I was more active in the field of amateur Mars observation, I corresponded regularly with scientsts at Ames, did a little grunt work processing images, and had the satisfaction of knowing that Ames had used my MOC image enhancement software to clean up the images used in the MER site selection process. I haven't the time to devote to that stuff in quite a while, but I miss it.

I'll get to Hawaii eventually. Never been there, despite living on the West Coast all my life, and I feel like I'm overdue. I started to plan a trip a few months ago but then other stuff came up. You can count on me showing up on your doorstep and asking for the tour, if I can just get myself over there. For most people the high point of a trip to the islands would be the beaches and the luaus, but for us space cadets, it'd be a trip up to Keck.