Woo hoo! Here's another one.

Merry Christmas all!

Whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope it is joyous and all of your family is there to celebrate it with you.

The days get longer from here on out.

Here is Tim Minchin singing it better than I can explain:

Sagan day.

We lost a fantastic advocate of science when Carl lost his battle with cancer. It is his birthday today, so I post this video to celebrate.

That's just great.

St. Petersburg now has a YEC Mayor.

What the hell kind of country do we live in when ideas that are more than 200 years out of date are still acceptable in a large proportion of the populace? How the hell is it possible in modern times to hold these ideas and not only not be marginalized, but elected into positions of power? Even if he really doesn't believe the Earth is 6000 years old, how on this old, old planet is it politically advantageous to claim "well the last 200 years of scientific advancement are nice and all, and I'm not going to give up my modern medicine or "Dancing with the Stars" or my internal combustion driven car with built-in relativity-dependent GPS, but I'm going to agree with that Archbishop of Armagh from 1625 on the age of the Earth".

What other crazy and out of date ideas does Foster hold? He promised clean energy investment and mass transit. Will he allocate funds for research into the luminiferous aether and phlogiston? Will he implement steam-powered street cars, or is that too new-fangled? Seriously, we're talking about ideas that were out of date before slavery was outlawed in this country.

Florida Gothic

Yeah, I know I should have the fiancee on my right with the implement of destruction between us, but after some serious trimming of an invasive species (the neighbor's Brazilian pepper) I didn't care too much. That saw makes a mean zombie defense weapon, too. Good thing I recharged the battery before Halloween. 18 volts of portable zombie and Brazilian pepper killin' power.

Yikes!

Has it really been that long since I posted? Sorry.

It's been a whirlwind couple of months. Everything from health stuff blowing up (a whole week in the hospital, I may elaborate later), to lab stuff getting busy, to lifestyle changes (I started running, quit smoking, quit caffeine and lost 10 lbs. If you know me personally, but we haven't talked in a while, I'm sorry I just made your head explode.).

That's a lot of parenthetical life events, isn't it? It's also a lot of blog fodder, so I will try to be a little more frequent with the postings. Maybe I can squeeze out a post or two on the weekends. We'll see.

Just keep in mind: I am not Metamucil®, I don't promise regularity.

The Galileoscope review. (Updated with new price)

I've promised it, and finally I have had a few nights of clear skies, so I got a chance to take it out for a spin. For those of you too impatient to read the whole thing, I'll give it away at the beginning:

Lab Boy sez "Galileoscope gets 5 moons!"

For those of you who want a bit more in-depth review, welcome to the rest. I must admit my scope time is limited. I have used the 6 inch reflector that was given to me in (I think) 6th grade. I have looked through a 4" Schmidt-Cassegrain in college. That's about it. Other than binoculars and spotting scopes (for hunting), I haven't used much to enhance my views of the skies.

As a kid, that 6" reflector was a royal (and looking back with the learning of age, expensive) pain in the ass. I could never get the spotting scope to line up, and I had no freaking clue how the hell to set up the equafragicaliazimuthicustical mount. I got very tired of that thing very quickly. I never pointed it to anything more challenging to find than the moon. Really. I never even tried to see Jupiter. With no introduction and no training (and no internet), I had no way to try to figure out any of that stuff. It sat in Dad's garage until a few years ago when he gave it to my cousin. I hope he doesn't get as frustrated with it as I did.

Looking through the Schmidt-Cassegrain was amazing. That scope was set up by one of my college profs in my freshman orientation term. It was super fancy: star tracking, planet tracking, moon tracking. That thing could track a falcon on a cloudy day, and it'll find you [/Princess Bride]. It was a joy to use. All I had to do was find the computer coordinates and tell it what I wanted to see, then focus.

These stories are relayed to illustrate my fear of telescopes. As far as I knew, they were either cheap(er) and so frustrating to use as to be useless, or so expensive as to be out of reach of folks like me.

Naturally, with the march of technology and the ever dropping price of electronics, that has changed a bit in recent years, but to get a marginally decent computer driven scope will still set you back several hundred bucks. The manual stuff can be good, if you know what you are doing, but if you don't...

And what about your kids? Introducing them to the beauty of the universe with something that isn't a toy?

Finally, there is something available that fits some neglected criteria.

As I said before, the Galileoscope was relatively easy to put together, though the instructions that came with mine were a bit lacking. It seems to be very well thought out and made. I was a little skeptical at first (quelle surprise!), but the main light gathering lens is a glass doublet, which I am told is good for a cheap scope. They even roughed up the inside of the scope to prevent nasty reflections. It has a gunsight style aiming device on the top, so it's basically point and shoot look.

After a frustratingly long time, we finally had a clear(ish) night. We had a couple of friends over (who I had married on July 4, cool, but a story for another time) and I dragged out the scope. I had mounted it on my dad's tripod (probably older that I) and I took it to the end of the driveway. The fiancee was ready for bed and not too happy that I had invited the friends over in the first place, but as soon as I aimed that thing at Jupiter and gave her a look...

Wow.

This is not a toy. This is a legit scope and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's super easy to use, so it won't frustrate the young folks the way my old reflector did.

I hereby highly recommend the Galileoscope to any lay person who wants to look at the skies, and certainly to any parent who wants to give their child something to spark that curious spirit that will serve them well in life.

So here is the reason for the rating that I gave in the very beginning of this post:

I saw 5 moons of Jupiter!


Five moons. Through a $15 $20 telescope. (UPDATE: They raised the price by $5. It's still remarkably inexpensive. And you can donate scopes for $15.) I'm buying more to give as gifts.

I think the folks at Galileoscope can happily claim mission accomplished.
I can't wait 'till Saturn is up in the early nights again...

(Sky pictures to maybe follow if I can figure out how.)