I Saw the Moon Last Night

It's been raining a lot here this summer, making the usual talk of Colorado summer fires and droughts seem extremely ridiculous as they show up on the same page of newspaper where they describe recent flooding in the area. The other side effect of all this rain is that we rarely have clear nights. But last night, Mark and I left to go grocery shopping and stopped just outside our front patio. The sky was clear. We quickly took care of that whole "buying food for the week" task and returned home to see about setting up Mark's telescope. Living in the north Denver Metro area makes finding a dark sky difficult, but we decided to use some protected areas in our apartment complex to look at the moon.

I know I've looked through a telescope before. I must have. My brother had a telescope once. I think. But I don't really remember the experience. So when Mark put his swanky scope together and plopped on one of the high power pieces, I was a bit stunned to actually, really, truly see the moon. Not only could I study the craters and the other surface features, but I had to keep adjusting the scope to keep the moon in my field of vision because that squirrelly sucker of a celestial object was huffing it across the night sky. Unfortunately, there was way too much moisture in the air to really see anything else. Jupiter had already set by the time we got the scope set up, and the bleeding of Denver's light prevented us from getting a lock on Pluto or Uranus. But we have the scope assembled and on display in a corner of our dining room (along with the keyboard, the cookbook shelf, the display thingy for some crystal vases, and, of course, the dining room table; yes, it's cramped, but we'll survive).

If you haven't looked through a scope and studied the moon's surface, you just haven't lived. Check out your local astronomy hobbyist club or, if you're near a big university, see when they have their public viewings. It's a bit indescribable to be standing outside of your apartment, looking into a cardboard tube with mirrors and staring at the detail of the moon as it passes through the night sky.

And in other big news, Mark was able to update our website yesterday. He's even included a little sidebar of entertaining snippets from this humble blog. Check it out.