Scattered Thoughts . . .

I'm laying low for a while since I'm fighting off a cold. The cold isn't so terrible (yet) but my mast cells are angry causing some serious problems related to my primary illness. While I'm recovering, I am taking advantage of the quiet time to catch up on some blog entries.  One thing I have been meaning to write about is a wooden telescope case I designed and built. I have this nice, new, high-quality telescope but I had no way to store it. I feel a telescope of this quality deserves a nice case. Actually, I'd like to do this with all of my optics and I do have plans to do this very thing... I just need to find the time and energy!  I just finished the first homemade case which is for storing my better telescope and I have another wood case almost finished which is to store the tracking mount for this telescope. I also want to build a few other cases for other astronomy gear. This is something I should have started doing many years ago with my camera gear and

Last night, I quickly assembled my good telescope on the deck so Sheila and I could get some quick views of the moon and Jupiter. Sheila hasn't had an opportunity to view anything at all through my good and bigger telescope until now so last night was a first for her. Her only reference to a quality telescope was her few views through the little cheap telescope I rebuilt in recent weeks.  First, we checked out the moon... we started by observing the entire moon in the field of view... this elicited the first of many WOW's  from Sheila. Compared to the views she has seen before through the small rebuilt telescope, this better telescope provides stunningly crisp and bright views. The views of the moon are so bright, in fact, that we need to use a filter to cut the light down to only 13%. Then we moved to more powerful combinations of eyepieces and barlows. She got to see very closeup views of various craters as well as closeup views of the Montes Apenninus mountain range and