{"id":1112,"date":"2009-10-05T08:51:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-05T08:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/2009\/10\/05\/telperions-flower\/"},"modified":"2009-10-05T08:51:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-05T08:51:00","slug":"telperions-flower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/2009\/10\/05\/telperions-flower\/","title":{"rendered":"Telperion’s Flower"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday morning on the way to work, I listened to an Astronomy Cast show on dark skies<\/a>: areas far from cities where one can still see an amazing number of stars plastered across the sky. My own most amazing dark sky experience occurred on a 1am drive from Roanoke to Bluefield: it happened to be a perfectly clear winter night, and as I looked up through the windshield for a second, I saw more stars in the sky than I’d seen in my entire life. Darn near wrecked the car, I was so transported by the sight.<\/p>\n

At any rate, last night on the way home from an errand, I saw a brilliant, clear moon hanging in the sky over the house. Suburban Chesapeake is far too bright for many other stars, but I suddenly decided that this would be the perfect night to assemble and set up my Galileoscope<\/a>. It went together easily, though I’m not 100% sure I assembled the optional Galilean eyepiece properly. I’ve since found a PDF<\/a> with more detailed instructions, but the basic setup worked well enough.<\/p>\n

As the instructions mentioned, we had to find a tripod: this is no spyglass. But once we got it focused and aimed, the moon was gorgeous. Starr and Celia and Chris and I all took turns looking through the eyepiece – a little tricky because the moon was quite high in the sky – and initial complaints about the setup time vanished. Even this simple observation with a basic ‘scope made the evening memorable as hell. I think that soon we’ll have to find a dark sky and a cool night and set up the Tasco Novice<\/a> that Starr gave me a couple of years ago. Awesome stuff!<\/p>\n

And then we went in the house and played Star Munchkin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday morning on the way to work, I listened to an Astronomy Cast show on dark skies: areas far from cities where one can still see an amazing number of stars plastered across the sky. My own most amazing dark sky experience occurred on a 1am drive from Roanoke to Bluefield: it happened to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,18],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-space","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1xCb9-hW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}