{"id":818,"date":"2006-04-25T17:22:03","date_gmt":"2006-04-25T22:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.50.194.231\/~vqplgdbg\/?p=818"},"modified":"2006-04-25T17:22:03","modified_gmt":"2006-04-25T22:22:03","slug":"sunday-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/?p=818","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent the vast majority of my evening with a friend at a local privately funded observatory. The observatory itself is incomplete but he brought his telescope, a Meade RCX400<\/a> in 12″<\/p>\n

Now, forever ago, I dabbled in amateur astronomy, and enjoyed myself immensely, but I had a very simple mount and a very inexpensive handmade scope. My mount and motor drive (basically, a big ring with a roller on it’s edge) was adequate to more-or less track something once I got it there, but wasn’t much good otherwise.<\/p>\n

This meade, I’m telling you, was amazing. It has a calibration routine you have to go through, and once it’s set up, you can go point to point at any damned spot in the sky; it’s a blast.<\/p>\n

Now I don’t have 7k to spend on a scope, and i probably never will. THis bastard is about a hundred pounds of carbon fiber, glass, and $kaching. With an aluminum base that is about as solid as they come. Fully electronically controlled. Just point and shoot. We looked at the rings of saturn, a dozen or better messier objects, mars, jupiter. We saw shit that you wouldn’t believe you can see through a scope. Ever see a real quazar? some parts are edible. No, wait… Anyway, it was a great time. It’s harder and harder to find clear skies untouched by artificial light, but if I don’t wear out my welcome, I’ll be taking some pictures this summer, and I’ll post them here. What a blast!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent the vast majority of my evening with a friend at a local privately funded observatory. The observatory itself is incomplete but he brought his telescope, a Meade RCX400 in 12″ Now, forever ago, I dabbled in amateur astronomy, and enjoyed myself immensely, but I had a very simple mount and a very inexpensive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}