Last Saturday: Thought about going out observing, but my back was bothering me a bit, so we decided to stay home and watch a movie instead. See Stupid Neighbor Tricks for summary of the remainder of the evening.

Last Sunday: Didn’t really feel like going out of the house, due to my back still bugging me, and not wanting to see the neighbor outside. Stayed inside pretty much all day.

Monday: Went to work. buncha meetings.

Tuesday: Site problem in the morning. Also, back pain was worse. After dealing with the problems, I decided to stay home and nurse my back. Ordered in for Thai food.

Wednesday: Went to work. More meetings.

Thursday: Minor site problem in the morning. More meetings.

Friday: Went to work. More meetings.

Saturday: Finally got the telescope out to Darren’s house to do some observing. After playing with the finderscope briefly, we turned our attention to the main scope. (It is a Celestron 11 inch, nice scope). Well, it took some experimentation with different eyepieces and focusing to see anything at all through the scope, but we sort of got the hang of it after an hour of fiddling. GPS auto-alignment is sweet, the only minor confusion was finding out which star we were supposed to center the scope on when dozens were visible. But after the second try, we managed to get it aligned. We were able to see both Jupiter (including some stripes across the center and three of its moons next to it) and Saturn (complete with a ring around it). Downside was, everything was a little fuzzy, we weren’t able to get it to focus crisply. We think this was due to condensation on the outside – when we looked at the front, it was totally covered with dew, looking like a steamy shower door or something. I’m surprised we were able to see anything at all… the fact that we saw two planets and rings and moons with dew on the front is probably an indication of how huge and how nice this scope is. We stayed a while and played games as well, got home about 1:30.

Sunday: Did laundry, met up with kethry about lunch time, she stayed until about 7:30. corrii was here as well, getting the last bits of stuff from her room. After Kethry left, we decided to use the carpet cleaner on a couple of spots, which prompted an angry response from the neighbor, see previous entry.

Now to bed!!!!