Stargazing

Update on David Brin fangirlage: last week when I finished reading Brightness Reef, I'd thought I had one more book to go to finish the Uplift series. I got The Uplift War from the library two days ago and as it turns out, I have read that - or rather listened to it, in audiobook form, and not all that long ago (not over two years, since that was when I started listening to audiobooks). This supports my theory that my memory is strongly geared toward text. I retain spoken words rather badly, and my memory for music is limited to songs with lyrics.

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Went to the Hyde Observatory in the park in Lincoln with YH. We actually ended up spending quite a long time there. Its's a very nice park, reminiscent of the "lake gardens/taman tasik" type that ends up getting created around the artificial lakes left by tin dredges in former mining towns back home.

There was a short and quite bad homemade documentary on the Sun, although it did contain some useful tips (if you buy a small telescope, use a proper filter over the objective, DON'T trust the eyepiece filters because they "have a nasty tendency to shatter" when the hot sunlight is concentrated upon them). They handed out some free July star charts.

This reminded me of the star charts that came with the Quest fortnightly my dad used to buy (it was one of those things where you buy a binder and the issues come in loose-leaf pages that you tear apart and place in the appropriate sections). They had a cardboard cut-and-paste model with each issue. One time they had star charts, and for whatever weird reason the UK and Australian editions were both released in Malaysia, and we bought two copies without realizing they were different. Obviously since Malaysia's near the equator they both proved useful.

YH got trapped by this old guy who turned out to be a retired optometrist. He treated us to a lecture on how you should use your glasses as little as possible because they're designed for when you're focusing about 16 feet ahead, therefore using them for closer work such as reading causes eyestrain. I just tried typing without glasses; doesn't work terribly well though. He also suggested making a pinhole in a piece of paper and using that, since pinholes give you infinite depth of field. Nice old guy, a bit cheong hei as old people tend to be. Reminded me of my Ah Gong's lectures about health food and acupressure.

The cool stuff we got to see:

• Jupiter and the Galilean moons. I've always wanted to see those, since the first SF novel I read as a small kid was Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter. I think Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr novels early in his career, but you can definitely see some of the same themes pop up in later novels. They're a good intro to Asimov for kids.
• Albireo: a double star. We could actually see one was yellow and one was blue - pretty cool.
• M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (wahlau long name): a blobby...cluster of white stuff with more clearly visible stars scattered over it.
• M57, the Ring Nebula. It doesn't look as nice as the picture on the NASA site when you're not using Hubble though. Just like a small white ring.

Two of the volunteers who were operating the telescopes were chatting about some sort of contest that involved spotting "objects in Andromeda". Astronomy, the sport of geeks. Wonder why I haven't gotten into it before.