It's been a couple week.s The latter half of August was dubbed "vacation." Upon both of our returns to the outside life, I really, really miss Meg. I suppose that it would be nice to be able to commute with her into the city.

So as for thoughts. For a period, I considered posting on here my progress through Dan Brown's bestseller, Angels & Demons, which I snatched-up for a McDonald's nutritional beach reading. The beach never happened and neither did the book. I mean, I would like to finish it up, and it's not that it's a difficult book to slog through, but it's just.... bad. I guess that I should hold out a full review until I've completed the novel, but at this point, it feels more like an assignment than a read.

I also got out the old telescope for some summer viewing. You've likely seen a very bright star in the western sky not long after sunset (last night, it was close to the Moon), this is Jupiter, and it's particularly bright because right now, it's at opposition, meaning that we are seeing the entire planet illuminated (think of a full Moon brighter than a half Moon) while it's opposite us form the Sun (hence its rise as the Sun sets). Anyway, in the two-inch Newtonian, I managed to get a good (although brief, the mirror soon fell out) view of Jupiter and the Galilean moons. Moreover, as this is the 400th anniversary of these satellites' first viewing, I felt this oddly appropriate. There was a fascinating shared connection to astronomers past in doing this. My telescope is a fairly simple one (probably not unlike many in the 17th and 18th centuries), with a relatively low resolving power, so my view of the Jovian system was simple: one large dot with four smaller dots surrounding it in a perfect line. Later that evening, it occurred to me that my generation has, in fact, been spoiled by our view of thew planets. For centuries before, viewing Jupiter and its moons was a simple series of bright dots. While further structure would be determined through better observations, the paradigm shift came with the Voyager 1 and spacecrafts. The close-up views of the outer planets has defined our imaginations of these for the last thirty years. This did no less than a beautiful job in inspiring at least two generations of professional, amateur, and casual astronomers and brought the beauty and magnificence of our corner of the heavens to our front steps.

Re-discovering these as Galileo did was awe-inspiring.