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amy and i had a hard time getting the motivation to work out these past few weeks. we’ve been in auto pilot and haven’t worked out or been eating right. we tried to get started a few times and failed but now we’re firing on all cylinders. we’ve planned the whole week out, bought the groceries, nailed the past two days, and now we’re kicking some body for life ass. i feel great, i’ve been eating well, and i’m really pushing myself in my workouts. i don’t know how to explain it, but it just feels like we’re on track.

i was reading lance armstrong’s book from last year, every second counts and ran across a new quote that struck me:


“it’s unequivocally clear that life begins at birth and ends at death, and if most people on this planet understood that they would lead their lives very differently. we find religious or mysterious forces to fill in for our inadequacies, but heaven and hell are both here on earth every day, and we make our lives around them.” — j. craig ventner



it really speaks to a lot of the things i have always felt about the world and how people live in it. so many people are looking for a miracle or a signal from a higher power. stop looking for what isn’t there and instead make it happen for yourself. abrasive yes, but as honest as it gets.

well after 3+ years i broke down and finally picked up a new cell phone. after much bidding on ebay and monitoring on froogle i won the auction at the price i was willing to pay. what phone did i end up getting? i picked up the new sony ericsson z600, new to the united states at least. i picked up an unlocked version so that i could use it on the t-mobile network.


a few of the features: 128×160 pixel 65,536 color screen display, bluetooth wireless, tri-band (1900, 1800, 900), java, infrared, modem, wap 2.0, isync support, polyphonic ringtones, built in organizer, talk time of 9 hours and stand by of 300 hours. pretty cool ahe?


i picked it up not only because i was tired of the crap nokia phone i had but because it is so tightly integrated with my mac. i can have the phone in my bag while using it to surf the web on the train, message my friends and family via sms, and it can automatically sync with ical and the mac address book. i can remotely control my computer to play songs, give presentations, lock when i walk away, and more. basically it allows me to become more mobile and more connected at the same time. all brought to me by mac os x and it’s tight bluetooth integration. it’s not very often that a computer company really gets it right, but this is one of those times.

a few friends and i have decided to take a trip to watch a few stages of the tour de georgia. we’re planning on catching the 5th - 7th stages (friday april 23rd - sunday april 25th). we’ve already book the flights and are planning out the routes, hotels, and the other miscellaneous things. worst case we’ll sleep in the car … it’s going to be great, i’ve always wanted to attend a stage race. this should be a nice warmup to seeing the tour de france someday. my real goal for this race is to see lance armstrong race once before he retires. this is one of the races that postal is planning on racing before this years tour. it looks to be an exciting race bringing together a lot of foreign and domestic squads. look for updates soon!

i headed out to one of the club observing sites with amy and a guest (ron) on friday. ron is in the market for a 12.5” portaball and i’ve been talking with him a while about getting together to let him have a look through mine. we were finally able to agree on a date and time. we arrived at the site around 10:00 pm. it a little later than i’d like but at least we got out. we ended up leaving around midnight for a total of about 2 hours of observing.


we ended up wearing 2-3 layers of clothes each as the temperature was around 25 degrees fahrenheit. there were about 5 scopes out there when i arrived but one left pretty soon after we got there. here are most of the objects that we were able to see:

• alcor and mizar — both stars are in ursa major and were easily split with both the 35mm and 9mm. it was a fun easy object to show off the scope to someone. you can split both stars with the naked eye if you have decent vision but few people realize that mizar is actually itself a double star.
• m108 aka ngc 3556 — a slightly edge on spiral galaxy in ursa major. we first looked at it in the 9mm then the 35mm. i didn’t get a lot of time to analyze it but other people who looked at it through my scope were pretty impressed with the views. the edge on disk was easily distinguishable but i don’t think my eyes were light adapted enough to make out the details.
• m97 aka the owl nebula — a planetary nebula in ursa major. i was star hopping in ursa major when i found this in the 9mm and then again later in the 35mm. using adverted vision i could make some detail but i was limited in time. next time i want to try a few filters to see if i can make out any detail.
• m51 aka the whirlpool galaxy — a spiral galaxy with a companion in canes venatici. at first i thought we were seeing the wrong object because i didn’t know that i was supposed to be seeing two galaxies. i saw the two smudges and thought i had hopped from alkaid a little to far. this is a great looking object through both the wide field and narrow field eyepieces. i want to look at this object later in more detail, it was pretty amazing for the little bit of time that i looked at it. you could see some of the details in both galaxies and club members said that if the seeing is good you can see the joining of the two objects. at around 11:07 pm i saw the transit of the iridium 921 satellite pass through the eyepiece as i was viewing m51. i tried to move out of the way so amy could see it as well but it was moving far to quickly.
• the leo triplett aka ngc 3628, m65, and m66 — a group of spiral galaxies in leo. this was my first time seeing the leo triplet in any telescope. unfortunately, i didn’t have a lot of time to really view the detail but it was an amazing sight none the less. i found it in a matter of 2-3 seconds after pointing my telescope at this region of the sky. i can’t get over how easy it is to star hop with the portaball, i love it. the triplet takes up the central 60% of my 35mm eyepiece. all three show some amazing detail and i’m looking forward to visiting them again soon.
• clown nebula aka eskimo nebula — a planetary nebula in gemini. this was my first time seeing the clown nebula. bill (a fellow club member) showed my how to easily find it within gemini. once you find the faint guide star (not sure which one it was) in the finder, look for the pattern of stars just south of it (c shaped), you simply slide north a bit and bam there it is. i actually scanned past it a few times when i was looking through bill’s scope through his 22mm Panoptic. once he told me how to find it i was there in under a minute with my 35mm. very nice indeed! another object i want to try to make out with more detail later when i have more time.
• jupiter — amazing and bright tonight. we looked at Jupiter through both eyepieces as well as a borrowed televue panoptic 22mm. we also threw a green filter into my 9mm nagler to give it a little more contrast. there was clear detailed cloud banding visible as well as 6 moons. i didn’t get the opportunity to try a few of my other filters to see how it looked. i was able to look at it through bill’s high contrast filter and was very impressed with the details that were visible. i’m gonna have to get me one of those.
• saturn — at first the images weren’t that great tonight in the 9mm because the telescope hadn’t cooled down yet. by the end of the evening, just as it was starting to fall behind the tree line, the scope was cooled and the images were steadier. the rings were great though and we were able to see a few moons as well. although i couldn’t get the image to &ldauo;pop” in i could still make out some basic divisions in the rings and some colorization in saturn itself. i want to try to get out earlier in the evening soon before saturn falls into summer obscurity.

the only ones i wasn’t able to identify were the ones we found by scanning the sky. we found some amazing galaxies while scanning through virgo. that’s definitely going to be one of my targets of interest this summer when i get to a dark site. the lessons learned for this evening were to always plan for the scope cooling time. it wasn’t until we were in the car on the way that i realized that by the time we got there, set up, and let the scope truly cool down it was going to be 11:00 pm. yikes!!! i won’t let that happen again.


i’ve been itching to take the telescope and even though it was cold i was very happy that amy and i were able to get out and take it for a tour. the heavens are always an amazing site and even more so in dark skies.