Quatermass wrote:
Saw it. Hard to photograph, though.
Oh! I really regret not getting back up for it!
Bird walk alert:
Stargazing was a passing obsession of mine, as a child. I begged my dad for a telescope and he finally brought me one back from Taiwan, where he'd gone on business. We used to subscribe to
Sky & Telescope and keep an eye out for interesting things. My dad used to be an engineer at Rocket Research in the '70's (later Pacific ElectroDynamic). His brain was (and is) crammed full of the most interesting facts. We'd stand out on the back lawn while my little sister played in the bushes with her imaginary friends, and I'd ask him question after question about the planets and the stars and outer space.
Of course, one didn't have to ask too many questions. Once you got him going on about one of his interests, you'd be lucky if he stopped talking sometime in the next half hour. People would say "there he goes again
" but I loved it. I'd ask him questions and let him go on however long he pleased. I was hungry and I wanted to know it all. I think I was 12 years old before I managed to ask him a question for which he didn't know the answer by memory. I still remember how shocked I felt when I heard him say, "I don't know--we'll have to look that up." When I saw that scene in
The Matrix, where Neo is hooked up to that program that teaches him Kung Fu and all sorts of other things, I thought of my dad telling me about the world. Unforunately my mind is not organized enough to be able to retain such a volume of facts, but it's something I look back on with fondness.
Flagg wrote:
Postperson wrote:
It wasn't spectacular, just a pale rust colour, all over in a a coupla hours. I was watching it during the ad breaks for Australian Idol.
It was better in the Pacfic Northwest - here it looked like the moon was covered in blood.
Ahh... must have really been something!