Balancing Life

The other night, before the ice got so thick on my butt that I had to break it with a chisel, I did manage to catch at least a few views of the sky with a variety of instruments, including a 6" SV-152 apo refractor and the 30" Obsession dob.

However, it was my friend Jeff Barton's new C-11 where I realized that it wasn't just my butt that was freezing, but also my brain.

Jeff was doing some old fashion star-hopping around the Big Dipper. Fun stuff, especially the Messier objects around that vicinity. Seen them hundreds of times and I have no problems pointing a scope to any of them, even that lame, poor excuse of an object, M40, that Charles Messier must have catalogued when he was high on crystal-meth, or at least, the 18th century equivalent!

I stood back for a while, watching Jeff enjoy the pleasures of deep-sky hopping, knowing that Jeff was safe and cozy by virtue of the batteries that powered his electric vest. You see, Jeff normally spends most of his time with the aforementioned SV-152 looking at planets and brighter deepsky objects, so I was proud of Jeff for gunning for some of the more challenging objects that are better targets for 11" scopes.

So when he started looking for the M97/M108 combo, I was excited. Now normally I'd have no trouble just jumping in there and helping with an object, and when he started having some problems finding M97, as much as I wanted to help, I decided that I wouldn't butt in. Certainly, he's capable. Certainly, he's having fun in the search.

So I stood behind his scope, just kinda double-checking it myself...

"But wait a minute. Which dipper star is it off of? Megrez? Dubae? Crap. Why is the dipper standing on it's handle? Has it ever done that? My gosh, what's going on in jay's astronomy world? Oh god, don't tell me I'm gonna have to look at...gasp...a STAR CHART! I don't even have my red light; and my iPhone is warming in the jail. Oh my god, my head is spinning! Is this the southern hemisphere? What's that bright star over there? M97, the Owl, an object I've found dozens of times and enjoyed with an OIII filter, is fading from my memory! Ahhhh!"

So today, after thawing out my brain, I'm left to wonder what could have happened? Just earlier that evening, I pointed directly to NGC2903 in Leo on the 30" dob without so much of a hickup. Admittedly, it's not the most challenging of objects to find, but at least I have definitive proof that before the "M97-Incident," as it's come to be known in this region, I was actually of semi-sound-mind-and-frozen-body.

So what happened? Why am I losing my sky knowledge? I know that I'm not able to spend as much time with the sky recently, but could it also be an early onset of Alzheimers?

Nah, I think that perhaps it's this...

As much as I gripe to my astronomy friends about how busy I am, and how I don't get to do astronomy as much, the truth of the matter is that THE universe is not as important to me as MY universe. Little Sara Ryan, now nearly 6 months old, is M42, Saturn, and the Veil Nebula, all wrapped up in one. Helen, Will, and Peyton are my Sun, Moon, and stars. I like MY universe.

So the next time you hear me wailing and moaning about how unfortunate I am to have all this great equipment and I don't have time I use it, feel free to tell me to shut the hell up!