Pigs in Heaven
One of the benefits of living in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking) is that the you can get a good look at the night-time sky.
One of the disadvantages of living in the middle of nowhere is that your friends have to park a quarter mile away so they don't get stuck on the slab of ice that is your driveway.
Jonah and Loren came up last night too look at Machholz.
Our first attempt to find it with binoculars was a bust — it was a little bit cloudy. "Oh, I think I see it," I said. "Hmm, or maybe not." As the clouds rushed by, we watched the comet dance coquettishly in and out of view.
Cold fingers convinced us to return inside where we reminisced about times past, talked about Star Trek, and I forced them to listen to the Star Wars Christmas album.
We decided to make some tea and noticed that the clouds shifted, so we went back onto the roof.
Between my crappy binoculars and my awful night vision I hard a hard time finding the comet, which was supposed to be near the Pleiades. I finally found the comet with the binoculars (it turns I thought the comet was the Pleiades — all smudges look alike) and then found the real Pleiades. Through the binoculars it is the most beatiful constellation I have ever seen.
The comet was a disappointment (no visible tail, just a smudge, really) but getting a good look at the Pleiades (why I had never done this before, I don't know) made my night. I think it would be pretty hard to overstate how much optical lenses changed our worldview.