An Amazing Deal!

I checked my email early this morning, as always, and guess what I found? Amazon dot com is offering me a fantastic deal!

"Watch the Perseid Meteor Shower With a Discounted Celestron Telescope!"

The advertisement goes on to tell about how fantastic and reliable this meteor shower is each year, and how in honor of this event I can now purchase telescopes to watch the whole thing at special prices. I even got a special code to enter to get this bargain basement pricing.

Of course, the problem is, you can't watch a meteor shower with a telescope. The field of view, the portion of the sky you can see, is way too small to see meteors. Meteors go streaking across the sky in all kinds of random directions, even though shower members emanate from a particular point in the sky, the radiant. They are gone in the blink of an eye, mostly. There is no time to react and point a telescope.

This year, the Perseid shower peaks on the morning of August 12th. Get up around midnight and go outside. The best thing to do is lay on your back in a lawn chair and just look up with your unaided eyes. The Moon will be setting by then, and you should be able to see at least one or two every minute.

Maybe Amazon has a special on lawn chairs for astronomers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Of course, the problem is, you can't watch a meteor shower with a telescope."

Better not tell the telescope meteor groups that, they'll be surprised :-รพ

http://www.imo.net/tele

Of course, in the context you're addressing, you are right.

But with astronomy you can't just assume stuff, coz you'll find some bugger somewhere is doing it that way.