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*Patrick Moore tells this one:
It is of a fairly eminent astronomer (whom Patrick refused
to name) who,
one clear dark night , found himself away from his state-of-the-art
instruments. Gazing up at the southern sky, he saw a
star far brighter
than its companions. He rushed inside for a star atlas
in order that he
could identify it and found that the bright object was
not marked.
Eager to be the first to report this supernova, he dashed
off the
appropriate telegram, only to find that he had made a
completely
independent discovery of the planet Saturn.
From: Dan Baldwin
I bought my first telescope when comet Kohoutek (sp ?)
was supposedly
visible. It was a 60mm Jason and had an equatorial mount.
I did not
know how to set up the mount and following objects was
hard. I was told
to look on the western horizon just after sunset to find
the comet and
that it would have a reddish tail-- A couple of friends
and I finally
found it, a long reddish tail, bright central core, plus
it was moving !
Had to be the comet--- We had about five exciting minutes
until we
saw other comets as well and realized we had been looking
at a jet with
a long contrail.
From: Teresa May
During this years total lunar eclipse, I set my 35mm
camera up on a tripod
so that I could snap a few pictures of the moon. Although
we didn't get to
see the whole eclipse (clouds moved in) I was happy to
think that we would
at least have a small momento of the part we did get
to see... A couple of weeks later I decided to use up the rest
of that film roll so
that I could get it developed and see how my moon pictures
had turned out.
I went out into the yard and took pictures of the flowers,
the garden and
my kids to 'burn up' the remaining film. It took a LOT
of pictures - TOO
MANY PICTURES. "Rewinding" the
film and opening up the camera to see what
the problem was, I found that I had forgotten to put
film in! (I'm not
normally this stupid - I've had this camera for several
years, and that was
the first time I had ever done that...but what bad timing!)
From: Wayne Hally
I hereby nominate an unnamed fellow meteor observer,
who watched the Leonid
peak this year, carefully tape recording his scientific
observations so as not
to take his eyes off the sky.....
with the pause button depressed all night long.
From: Dave Morris
Had to borrow
a blooper from someone else. I was talking with
a guy about buying his 12" SC, and he told me about
the time he packed up the scope and headed up
to Yosemite (6 hour drive) with friends. After
hiking up to their intended observing site,
he asked
his buddy to unpack the eye piece case. His
buddy said, "I
thought YOU packed the eye piece case." Ouch!
From : Chris Kan
PE observer on the platform had his chair tilted
back, feet up ... watching the chart recorder ...
fell asleep,
woke up hanging by his hands from the edge of the
platform in the dark ... question ... was the drop
2 feet or 35
feet? Couldn't remember exactly where the dome
was rotated ... swing forward and hope ... drop
was 6 inches :)
From : Mark Roosevelt
One night about ten years back I was watching the
shadows thrown across
Archimedes. Suddenly a multi-legged creature appeared to walk across
the face of the
moon. After jumping back about ten feet I looked in the
eyepiece.
A teeny spider had taken up residence in the eyepiece.
From : Deborrah Maxi My son and I were en route to a music store
called MARS, the musicians resource.
It's a huge discount store selling
guitars and amps and stuff. We were on 71 North
when
I saw something that looked like an airplane coming
down in flames. Then I realized it
wasn't coming down. It
continued across the sky from the west to the east,
throwing off flaming debris in green,
red, and yellow colors,
and seemed to move rather slowly across the sky.
Traffic on the freeway literally
stopped. People pulled over
and climbed out of their cars to stare at it in
amazement. When we finally got to
MARS, I immediately called the
local television station and asked if they had
been getting reports about a fireball.
The woman who answered said
that they were swamped with calls. I told her that I
was an amateur astronomer and could probably give her
a fairly objective description of the fireball. "That's
great!" she said. "Exactly where were you when
you saw it?" "We were on our way to MARS," I
said. She hung up on me. True story in Cinci. Larry
Brown
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