There's a saying among amateur astronomers that if you buy a telescope there will be six full weeks of clouds, thus denying you of any use of your new toy.
I purchased a telescope...and I'm terribly sorry.
Picture: Orion Telescopes
My new Orion XT10 arrived in three boxes, the biggest of which would only barely fit into my Toyota Echo hatchback. I had been anticipating the arrival of my scope for a couple of days and was delighted to have received it. As I negotiated the stairs up to my front door with the largest of the packages, I couldn't help but consider that I was responsible for the impending downpour. Rather than dampen my spirits, I looked forward to assembling the base of the telescope and putting together the electronics.
Now for those of you who don't know me, it is widely accepted that I am the "Anti-Handyman" with only minimal assembly skills. My wife Gwen usually makes herself scarce whenever I take on projects with screwdrivers and drills, out of concern for her delicate sensibilities and her respect of the fact that I have to win in the battle against the bad thing that is fighting me. Yes, the difficulty level of my attempted projects is usually measured in curse words. These days, with a nine year old in the house, the curse words have been replaced with the Flintstones equivalents such as "Frazamazta","Dookentoble" and "Krazellbatz". The hardest projects get a five "Frazamazta" rating.
Luckily, the good folks at Orion Telescopes have a decent set of instructions to follow and being a long weekend, I took my time. Only an hour went by before I had a telescope.
This evening, a hole opened in the clouds. I hurried down the steps as best I could carrying a huge telescope tube almost as big as myself. Within a couple of minutes I was good to go. What would be my first object? My skies were blocked except for mostly overhead. I opted for a famous double star called Albireo. As I swung the tube around I relished the thought of the ten inch mirror catching the light of the beautiful pair of stars -one blue and one orange...
...I'm still looking forward to seeing them, once the clouds part. Maybe I'll be lucky on Thursday.
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