Went outside with the binoculars when it got dark. I was looking to the western part of the sky when I eyed what I believed to be Mars. So I got out the telescope to check it out, and it was Mars (last time I saw Mars it was in the horns of Taurus). I also saw a beautiful binary system with an orange and yellow star, but I didn’t know what constellation it was in, so I took out my laptop and ran the astronomy program, and found it was Algieba about 126 light years away. Funny that I didn’t recognize Leo the constellation Algieba lies in, but my excuse is that Leo laid sideways in the western horizon. I also noticed that Saturn was nearby, had it sighted and focused when a faint satellite came zipping across my field of view. So I followed it till it vanished into the west. Cool! I didn’t realize at the time that I had been using a 6mm eyepiece so the satellite must have been very, very small. Maybe it was Ed White’s space glove he lost in his 1965 spacewalk! Nah! Well maybe!
Got inside just in time to watch “Seeing in the Dark” by author Timothy Ferris. I’ve seen it before and really liked it, so I made it a point to see it again tonight. One item I missed last time was when he was talking about the Andromeda Galaxy being 2.5 million light years away. When we are viewing the whole galaxy, the light from the nearest edge gets to us one hundred thousand years before the light from the back does! Now that gave me pause to think of scale, and just how immense our universe is! And there are billions upon billions of these galaxies in every direction we look. Great show!
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