Nice!

Sharing the science is one of the greatest pleasures of astronomy. It simply brings out the teacher in us. Don't take my word for it, just find an astronomy bulletin board on the net and note the number of people giving advice to beginners.

My wife had her grandkids up for a month this summer. Ashley and Tyler hounded me to set up my scope. Finally on a Saturday (when I didn't have to work Sunday), the weather cooperated.

Jupiter was up and the moon was waxing crescent. To my dismay, my memory of deep sky objects ended with M13 and M57. I was drawing a blank. I had to set up that goto thingy by polar aligning the scope and using a three star computer alignment. This time I got lucky and every entered object showed in the center of the eyepiece. M27, M81 and M82 and others including two handfuls of globulars.

I tried to convey my somewhat tire amazement about the size, age and distance of what we were looking at but the kids wanted to return to their Nintendo DS lites.

There's always next summer...