Jedolby

I'll bet if we could poll thousands of backyard astronomers, we'd find that a large percentage of them would claim owls as their friends. I fell for that notion years ago, but I'm over it now. Make no mistake, owls don't give a hoot about backyard astronomers! But when we're out there night after night, listening to the owls hooting at each other, it is very tempting to believe that they're curious about us and that they're trying to communicate with us. Backyard astronomy is a lonely hobby, and we welcome even the companionship of the animal kingdom. I must admit that of all the wild animal calls, a hooting owl is one of the most soothing, non-threatening sounds to hear nearby in the darkness. I, too, like to think that they're reaching out to me for companionship. One night in 2020, as I was outside going through the process of shutting down my astronomical observations, an owl was perched on a nearby power-line pole. For several minutes, the owl was h...

  3I/ATLAS The other day, a friend texted me, "What do you think of 3I ATLAS?" For backyard astronomers like me, that's a loaded question. Especially when the answer is to be communicated by text. I don't know what non-astronomer types think when they read about comets and asteroids in the news. Without a telescope, and without being familiar with the constellations, they can't go out at night and look at it for themselves. They must use their imaginations. If they've never looked at a comet or asteroid firsthand, they have no idea how to imagine them, and they may not have any understanding of what these objects are.  Even the beginners out there who have Go-To telescopes will find it a challenge to find these objects. That's because comets and asteroids do not appear in the object catalogs built into Go-To telescopes. And if the user chooses to incorporate planetarium software to control the telescope via computer, he or she will need to update the comet...

  The Outer Limits was a TV series that ran on ABC from the fall of 1963 to early 1965. It was similar to the more widely popular The Twilight Zone . As a youngster, I saw a few episodes of The Twilight Zone , but since I was only 2 years old when the first episode of The Outer Limits aired, and not to mention that we couldn't pick up ABC on our family's television set, I can't say that I saw any of the original broadcasts. It would be many years later when I first heard of The Outer Limits. Of course, most amateur astronomers in the 1980s and 1990s became familiar with the old TV series, mainly because of its closing credits that were superimposed onto pictures of some of the best deep-sky objects taken by the world's largest telescopes. As I mentioned in an earlier post (or two), the average person didn't get to see many pictures of celestial objects in the media during those years. So, whenever there was a show like The Outer Limits or Star Trek , with picture...

  When I was 9 years old, this was the house I lived in. The little boy that you can see there above the Chevy pickup is my 10-year-old brother. And that's my dad up there, smiling in the window. He was reshaping the existing window to please my mother who said, "I have to have a window over the kitchen sink. I'll be happy if I can look out a window while I'm washing the dishes."  Of course, at that time, there was no kitchen sink in our house! It had no indoor plumbing! Our water came from a 25-foot well just a few feet from the back door. We used an old-fashioned hand pump, probably from the 1930s, to pump water into a bucket and then we'd carry the water into the kitchen for drinking, cooking, and bathing. A rain barrel under one corner of the barn roof collected enough water to use for priming the well, as needed.  Our bathroom was also old-fashioned. A little ol' shack out back was our bathroom, and it had no running water, either! The outhouse took a...