One of my simple pleasures in life is seeing how different people react upon first seeing a celestial object through a telescope. So late yesterday afternoon I took a break from faculty applications, proposal writing, and research papers to instead drag my old rickety Dobsonian telescope out for Halloween night.

Currently Jupiter is rising in the early evening. In fact, given the circumstances I don’t think I could have asked for a better object. I got everything set up a little too early so as kids and adults would come by I was some “very strange guy” with a giant tube on the sidewalk. I’ll admit that my homemade telescope is not a beauty queen and in fact looks rather like a water heater. So yes, I was the guy in a tie-dyed lab coat messing with his water heater out on the lawn on Halloween (I may have in fact frightened some children or at the least made some adults uncomfortable). You can tell people it’s a telescope and not a water heater (or some other piece of junk), but you really need something to look at before being taken seriously.

Eventually though the sky grew dark enough that I could find Jupiter (it being actually the first “star” I was capable of seeing). Very quickly after that my situation changed. There was jupiter; cloud bands clearly visible, colored white, browns, pink and orange. The great red spot was not visible, but the 4 largest moons made a nice decoration. At this point the “wow” factor took off. Anyone that I could convince to look through was suitably impressed and amazed. I had one little girl that came back 4 times bringing others with her to see the great planet. And that’s the whole reason for bringing the telescope out. No one expects that peering into a black eyepiece on some giant white cardboard tube is going to show them anything special. Instead of just seeing a little spec of light and being told “that’s jupiter” they instead see the full disk of the planet, enough structure to make out some detail, and its own moons.

And yes, I did my part to combat dentistry as well.