I mentioned earlier that I was going to buy new binoculars, and I will eventually get around to writing about them. However, in the meantime, I now “have” them, and can use them. So over a few nights, I have gone out to the backyard, setup in 30s, and just looked. I’m not going with a specific goal in mind, nor surfing the sky, just looking.
Unrelated, but I’ve also taken a few pics with my smartphone to see what I can get, and I’m looking forward to experimenting more at the in-laws’ cottage later this summer. Another area to push myself on.
But tonight around 9:00 p.m., I hopped in the car, went down to the river where the horizons are good, and waited to see if I could see the comet again. However, I also had an ulterior or secondary objective in mind. I wanted to see what I would see on the moon with the new binos.
Unfortunately, the clouds were terrible, and I didn’t think I would even find the moon. I had already figured out it was the smallest of slivers, just 2.2% of the surface was lit, the smallest I’ve ever tried for honestly. And BAM! Between my app and the binos, I nailed it. That was super cool. I’ve never seen it that small of a sliver before. There is a small set of astrophotographers who specialize in trying to get the smallest sliver possible. Someone even set a record a few years ago, the smallest possible sliver that can still be seen. I’m not even close to those small numbers, but I saw the 2.2% sliver. Quite cool.
The comet? Not so cool. It is much higher in the sky now, almost three fists up, and almost directly under the middle of the Big Dipper’s basket. Or, in Ottawa prose, EXACTLY where a huge swath of clouds were going by. Another guy and I were there waiting, and I pointed out the moon to him, plus Jupiter and Saturn, but he was only really surprised by the moon and looked for about half a second. He was there for the comet. But it was not to be. It socked in really well and no comet was to be had anytime soon.
I took a few more pics at home, trying to see what I can get with my smartphone on a tripod, and I really need to spend some time setting up a bigger tripod option and to have it figured out before the cottage. I REALLY want to try imaging a bunch of constellations and I need stability to do that.
But overall, I was mostly pushing myself to use the binos to just get out and observe, even without a plan at this point. To engage, to search, to view, to learn.
Today I choose to push myself on my astronomy hobby.
I love to read, but I find it hard to work into my schedule. Which is not to say my schedule is “full”, I just mean there aren’t natural times when I’m likely to read.
When I was in elementary school, I would read in school when I was supposed to be doing school work, read while I walked home sometimes, read until supper, read until bed, and read on the way back to school the next morning where I would get three more books (I was in Grade 3 or 4 as I recall).
Later, I would read on buses while commuting, but that was always a crapshoot as to whether I would feel nauseated or not.
But lunchtimes? That was ME time. Grab some food, ignore the world, and read. A friend of mine that I met at french training was really struggling because he had to drive to the school. Normally, he would read on the bus in the morning for almost 40 minutes on his way to work, plus over lunch, and then 40 minutes on his way home. He had LOTS of time. Once he started French? He was basically down to lunch hour. It was driving him bonkers.
When I’m at the office, I drive to work so reading-by-commute is out. I do read at lunches sometimes, but I also often use that time to read news articles more than books.
These days, my book reading often goes in binges. I rarely have a book “on the go” so to speak…I’m either reading intensely or I’m not reading at all. We bought books for Jacob on the weekend, and I need to read three of them for mature themes and content before he does. Today, I plowed through the last 3/4 of I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore. I’ve seen the movie and practically fell asleep; the book was much better, and while it is about war, there is some normalcy in there too. I don’t know that Jacob will enjoy the book, but I’m fine with him giving it a try. He read Maximum Ride by James Patterson, and there are some similar but less fantastical elements. More sci-fi than fantasy for this one.
But I took most of the evening off from my to do list to just sit and read. Yeah, sure, I was burning some files from one media to another, did a couple of chores, wrote this post, caught up on some discussions I’m part of online. But mostly I just sat here and read while the other stuff hummed along. And I finished the book. I feel like it took me longer than normal though…440 pages in total, and I was already about 100 pages in when I started reading tonight, but it still took me over 3 hours. But I definitely zoned out in there. Want to know the weird part? I did it while sitting at my desk. I didn’t even move to a comfy chair. I guess that means the story was engaging enough that I didn’t even notice! 🙂
I am not now, nor have I never been, a member of the Commun…oh wait, wrong denial speech. I was GOING to say that I’m not a style maven in any way, shape or (literal) form. I don’t dress well, I’m not built for showing off clothes, and I don’t have high-end manners. On a good day, I’m a schlub.
That doesn’t stop at the body or clothes, it continues up into my hair. I had bowl cuts as a kid, with my father using his skills from the Army to give us various hair cuts. I really don’t know what happened in earlier years as he did a decent job sometimes in the teen years, but from about age 16, I just went to the barbershop and paid with my own money. And that continued right up until Covid.
For Jacob, we’ve never been ones to try and cut his hair. Why traumatize him when we can take him some place that has videos on TV screens right in front of him to distract him? Chiquicuts covered us for a long while, but he outgrew them, and most of the time we go together to a place like First Choice and get it done some night when nobody is busy. Or a Sunday afternoon. Similar cuts for both of us, quite short, above the ear, square back, high bangs, lots of clipper action. He likes it, I like it, but if he wanted a Mohawk, I’d probably get him one. He doesn’t, he likes low maintenance like I do. Until Covid.
We waited until our hair got long in April/May and then did the home special with Andrea cutting mine, and mostly me cutting Jacob’s. Mine was a bit rough, but fine by me, and Jacob’s turned out passable as our second attempt.
Yet things are open again. We COULD go. But honestly, do I REALLY care if my hair isn’t perfect? Only my work team really sees me on Zoom, and half the time I leave the camera off to increase stability of the network. Jacob is in the same boat, he doesn’t really go anywhere and his last haircut at home turned out really well in his view, he was quite happy with it. I gave him the option of considering going out, but he said that we should just do it at home.
And to be honest? I was willing to let him go as a mild risk if everyone is masked, but I wasn’t loving the idea. Risk goes up with proximity and time with other people who aren’t in your bubble, and you can’t do haircuts without both of those violating the normal social distancing routine. Hard to cut hair from 6-feet away, and you are literally breathing in the other person’s air as they get close to your head. And while everyone says, “Yeah, but you’re wearing a mask.” Yeah, a mask sewn together by your friend, not a PPE device that actually blocks any water molecules. Ever worn a scarf or balaclava and breathed out while it covered your nose and face? It still steams up the air pretty strongly. The cloth masks work, but they’re not PPEs. There’s a reason why doctors and nurses are not just throwing on a cloth mask.
But I digress. The point? We chose safety over style. Are our resulting haircuts as amazing as we could get from any barber in Canada? Nope, not really. Andrea did a good job on mine, but my head is a bit misshapen, and you can see it very clearly on top of my head. It’s like there’s a sunken area and when you do a general clipper cut, it contours to the shape of your head more than a scissors-based cut would likely do. Jacob’s turned out okay, but not as good as the last time. I feel like the sideburns didn’t cooperate as much as the previous time.
On the positive side, the clippers have now paid for themselves in terms of the money we’ve saved on four haircuts (Jacob and I x 2 each). Definitely on the savings side of the equation now, baby! I’m curious to see Jacob’s choices when we get back into regular outings if/when there’s a vaccine. For me, I’m fine either way. I’d just prefer that when Andrea’s cutting my hair that she would stop saying “oops” so often; it is VERY disconcerting and not at all related to the final outcome.
In the meantime, today I choose to prioritize safety over style.
My son is not the type of kid who always asks for stuff as soon as we set foot in a store, and he never has been. Sure, he has some great toys in the way of an XBox One S, a number of games, and a new laptop a few months ago for his time for school-from-home, but he isn’t a particular hoarder of anything commercial except books. He isn’t generally very materialistic.
But he is going through social withdrawal or cabin fever of being cooped up. Because our house is at higher-risk than average for COVID-19 impacts, we have minimized most vectors pretty aggressively. Andrea rarely went out in the first 12 weeks; Jacob didn’t go anywhere commercial at all. I’m the sole vector and my outings tend to be for food or groceries. Or to work twice to pick up and drop stuff off. We’ve gone for a few drives around the city, but that’s about it. Oh, and visits to friends out on the river to go kayaking and have a BBQ night.
Today, he hit a bit of a wall. He’s bored, and lots of little things around the house that Andrea and I are doing are not a lot of fun. We’re in a minor purge mode, and that requires cleaning up and cleaning out certain areas of the house, like parts of the playroom, where some of the stuff is his. And I know that pain.
I too am getting decision overload on some of the clean up where every item is a question mark…do we want it, do we need it, are we going to regret getting rid of it…we’re not stupid enough to ask if it brings us joy, but well, it’s a painful time for 100s of mini decisions in a row where the consequences are not super high, just annoying. In many ways, it’s also about making choices about how we want to live and want we want to prioritize keeping. We play a lot of board games, so that’s a big area of our storage in the playroom, which has caused us to shift a bunch of stuff out of there like CDs that we never listen to anymore. At least not in CD form. Almost all of them are ones I have ripped and copied to iTunes, and if we don’t, well we have an iTunes subscription anyway. It’s not like we can’t hear a song or album we want just about any time of the day (with a few small exceptions like if I get a Garth Brooks hankering one day). But we also have Amazon Prime, free versions of Spotify and this little thing called the internet.
But I digress. I’m just saying that without friends to play with on weekends, as most aren’t on Fort Nite then, he gets a little rangy. And it’s cumulative. This afternoon it hit a peak. We were supposed to go get new sandals, but we pushed that to tomorrow. I was going to go to The Butchery for meat and Canadian Tire for a small bookcase, but that was not exciting him. In short, he just had a combo case of cabin fever and boredom, and moving well nigh into the mopes.
Time for Plan A.
We’ve been working on it for the last couple of weeks. He does NOT like wearing a mask, he says he finds it hard to breathe, and with his asthma and/or small lungs, that’s not surprising. He can get out of breath pretty easily and the psychological triggers don’t help contain it. So we’ve been working on looser fitting masks, pushing him a little more and more each time we go out, and I even bought a bunch of disposables that are lighter than his cloth one. Not as effective of course, but well, we have to work with what we have.
We took him to convenience stores yesterday for popsicles, and while it was a bit of an initial bust, that probably worked in our favour. He went to a pharmacy near our house, a pharmacy at College Square, and a dollar store at College Square, each one brief intros to shopping with a mask, and then finally guaranteed success at a Mac’s store. I almost said Mac’s Milk, but it hasn’t been called that for years, I know.
With those experiences in place, it was time for the big guns.
Today we went to Chapters. And we made a big production out of it too. Or, well, to be honest, I made a big deal about it. He brought some of his gift cards that he hasn’t used, I brought two that I had, and in we went. We were on a hunt for books for him that go beyond his existing series. He has a whack of books that were the next ones in his series but I’d love to find him stuff beyond the core series he reads now. Heck, if I could get him watching Star Trek, there are literally hundreds of books in those series. I might be able to get him on to Star Wars though, food for thought.
Anyway, when we arrived, we headed to the kids section but Jacob is pushing the upper boundary of his reading for the 8-12 set, so perhaps it was time for teens. A guy working there asked if he could help us find something, and while Andrea and Jacob were inclined to say no, I saw it as an opportunity to make it big. So I said, “Yes, please!”.
I explained he had read a whole bunch of series in the 8-12 range, from magical animals to dragons to anything with gods and demi-gods. But we had no idea where to start in the teen range, and we wanted to avoid getting into the sex and romance side of YA/Teen. As an aside, Andrea and I read a series called the House of Night, and it had a bit of a Harry Potter feel to its premise of a new vampire going to a vampire school, which lasted until about Chapter 3 when the main character saw her arch-rival performing oral sex on her boyfriend in one of the darkened corridors in the school. Not exactly Harry Potter! Andrea’s not sure he’s ready for The Hunger Games, but the guy did a great job of giving us some other ideas (teen versions of Cat Woman and Batman origin stories, for example) and then roping in another coworker. They asked Jacob lots of questions, came up with several new series to try and shut down potential interest in others (one was a little too adult for middle-grade in her view, and maybe even badly categorized).
But we went big. Lots of new books, Andrea went and found one too (The Tattooist of Auschwitz, oh that’ll be a light beach read!), and I found a couple that are for Jacob but I’ll read them first to make sure they’re okay for him. I Am Number Four, The Fifth Wave, and an animal magic book called Wild Magic. I remember the #4 movie, and it blew chunks as I recall, but the staff assured us before I even mentioned it that the books were good and to ignore the movie.
All in all, a very positive upbeat outing, we got some good stuff, renewed our Chapters membership just so I don’t order everything from Amazon, and we broke his “mopes” for awhile. More importantly, he succeeded in going out for almost 30 minutes or more with his mask on, and while it was pushing his limit, he did it. Not exactly a “normal” outing, but a lot more normal than anything else he has done in four months.
And his success with the mask bodes well for going shopping for sandals tomorrow. We’re all good. All it took was a little spoiling, with a bit of ulterior motive delivery in the background.
Today I choose to spoil my son to help break his boredom.
I have traditionally NOT been a binoculars guy when it comes to astronomy. If I’m totally honest, I’m even a bit judgey for those who respond to newbies questions about what type of telescope to get with “get binos, great way to get started” advice. It’s a common refrain, by experienced amateurs, and I think it can be amongst the worst advice to give anyone.
Why NOT recommend binos to newbies?
First and foremost, the learning curve is enormous for the sky. Yes, you can look at stuff easily and pan quickly, but almost EVERYONE starts with hand-held binos. Which shake in your hands. It is VERY hard to get decent sized binos to stay solid unless you are naturally still OR you rest against something with your harms. But they don’t tell people that, they just say “buy binos”.
Second, for many people learning, sometimes the best aspect is sharing it with others. Like kids. Can kids hold the binos steady? No. Not easily. So tell them to look at X, pan sideways and down a bit, blah blah blah….aaaand they’re gone. You’ve lost them. If you have a telescope and you set it on the object and say, “Here, look through here”, they will see what they’re supposed to see, generally speaking.
Binoculars combine low magnification with the highest degree of unsteady viewing and the worst learning curve to find objects. What could go wrong?
There are TONS of people who start with binos, get bored, and give up. Because someone knowledgeable told them that starting with binos was good, and if they find it wasn’t for them, they decide astronomy overall is also maybe not for them. Let me give you an example of why they might struggle.
If you want to find the Hercules Cluster, a small globular cluster of stars, and assume that you have dark enough skies to find it and see it, then you will likely have to start at a nearby known star, follow a small trail of stars by hopping from one star to another to work your way down the sky, and BAM, there’s your cluster.
Yet here’s the thing though for a telescope. You can find the first star, look at a map, look back at the eyepiece, look again at the map, figure out what the first “hop” is, make the hop, look back at the map, look again, etc. It doesn’t run away from you when you look at the map. It stays on the target.
If you’re using binos, and as I said, most people do NOT attach to a tripod initially, then you have them in YOUR HANDS, look up, see your starting point, put your hands down, look at the map, look again at your starting point, look up, put the binos down, look at your map again, etc. You’re “losing” your spot each time. If any of those markers are small or faint, or if you have to do three jumps, the first time star-hopping is going to be REALLY frustrating to figure out.
Binos CAN be good, I’m just not sure they come with enough context or caveats. Your big advantage though is that in binos, you see a HUGE swath of sky at a time, so the likelihood is that your telescope might take 3 jumps to do what in your binos only takes 1. But, again, it is less magnified, and you can’t see as much detail.
Making a choice
For me, though, I’m working on a personal guide to introductory amateur astronomy. If I’m going to write about binoculars, I have to know how to use them and the parameters I’m considering. Including owning a pair, trying various setups, etc.
Recently, famed Canadian astronomer Alan Dyer wrote an article in Sky News about the best binoculars for beginners in Canada, and he listed a number of choices. His cut-off was $300 and ones that are generally available in Canada, which is a pretty good starting point for me. One of my complaints about a lot of bino lovers is that when asked about bino models, they frequently recommend binos that cost $500-$1500. The RASC Observers Handbook has a similar snobbyness in it towards only high-end binos, well out of the price range of most beginner astronomers. For the same price, they could have a telescope that would kick butt three times over. But I digress.
Am I potentially “complicating my life” by expanding? Absolutely. But I’m also simplifying somewhat. Right now, for example, Comet Neowise is all the rage. I could go down to the river, set up my telescope, do all that work, OR I could just look through the binoculars. I do want to get good at using them. Yet I was still on the fence.
Until a webinar like the one I mentioned yesterday on astronomy answered me a different way, which is a bit similar to the original advice of astronomers. If you’re using 8x42s, it’s a good way to learn your way around the sky pretty fast.
Not a good tool necessarily for getting into astronomy, but a good tool to use when learning the night sky, star hopping, and constellation mapping. That’s a more practical bit of advice, and not limited to newbies.
So today I choose to expand my astro gear with binoculars.
