kalahari clouds & moon

You could sell this place on the skies alone. I wish I had the equipment to take some super-long-exposure night sky photos... They'd be stunning. Oh well. A mission for when I'm older and richer, and return to Botswana.

On Wednesday night I spent the evening with C and H, the creators of the Naro Language Project. After a delicious supper and some interesting conversation, H and I went outside to fiddle around with his telescope. I'd never actually looked through a small telescope before; I've been on various school field trips to observatories, but to look into this relatively small device was something completely different. There's a sense of removal when you go into a big observatory, with a Real Astronomer in a lab coat, and peer into a gigantic apparatus whose full extent you can't even see. There's too much incomprehensible technology in the way. It seems possible that those sneaky "astronomers" could plug a television into the eyepiece of their "telescope," and you'd never know the difference.

When you aim the telescope yourself, it's different. When you can hold the entire thing and pick it up, see the spindly metal arms of the adjustors and the gleam of the lenses - then it seems real. H found Saturn and I sat on a kitchen chair, knees on either side of the telescope's tripod, one eye screwed shut and the other intently focused on that tiny, glowing white dot - Saturn! Saturn is about 1.2 BILLION kilometers away from Earth, and it takes light bouncing off of Saturn about an hour and 15 minutes to reach the Earth. So far! The dot visible in the telescope was tiny, an infinitesimal dust mote - yet with H's encouragement, when I looked very closely, what I had previously thought to be just a blur was in fact the incredibly thin but incredibly precise thread of Saturn's rings. It was more exciting than I can explain without sounding like a doofus - just a tiny, barely-visible line on a tiny, barely-visible dot. Exciting? YES! When I realized that I was actually seeing the rings in perfect definition, I almost jumped out of my socks. It's real.

And then we looked at the moon, which was also crazy (it's so close!), but more about that later. I'm going to go back to H's house and look at the moon again when it is about half-full, to see the shadows.