I don't think I'm actually in the fast lane, but it sort of feels like it. The past month has had me away for two weeks, one with the Cub Scouts in Alpine, NJ and another at the Summer Star Party in Savoy, MA. Between that and being in physical therapy three days each week since the shoulder surgery at the end of April, time is passing too quickly and I can't keep up. Fortunately, most of our bills are in autopay mode, so the only bad thing happening is that too much paperwork is piling up and not being recorded and filed.

I originally built these models a couple of years ago, but didn't realize it was something "novel" until I got some comments at this past year's NEAF where I had brought them for the children's section. Quite frankly, I think it works well with adults, too, as I've heard some well-educated adults propagating common misconceptions about what causes the phases of the moon.

It's been a busy year. I bought this at NEAF back in April and have only just now been able to get out and give it a spin. The new feature, of course, is the autoguiding. With the original TT320, the specifications state a periodic error limit of 5 arcseconds per 5 minutes. As it works out, when using my Borg 45ED lens, the pixels in my Canon 350D are about 5 arcseconds wide. What I've seen is that I can, with great care, get exposures up to 4 minutes long, but some of them invariably show trailing and have to be thrown out.

The April 24, 2010 issue of Science News has an interesting article entitled "Gambling on Experience" which reports on research into how we (people) guestimate risk in real life. I call it interesting both because it is an interesting social question, but also because of a recent dialogue about the topic of cell phones and brain cancer risk reported in a popular magazine.

Missouri is my home state.  I grew up in what was then a rural area south of St. Louis, in Arnold.  Seeing the stars at night was no big deal, and something I took for granted. Arnold can longer be considered rural and in the intervening 40 years has gone through the typical suburban sprawl growth pattern along with major increases in bad night-time lighting.  During our family visit last summer (2009), it was apparent that the skies are only slightly better than here in Brooklyn, NY despite the lower population density of Arnold.  I'll come back to that in a minute.

The January 2010 issue of Physics Today's web watch section mentioned the Sun|trek web site which contains a number of resource for learning about the Sun and it's effect on the Earth.  The material is varied and the comment about being "devoted to teaching schoolchildren" is a bit vague on the age group, but the format includes a large number of images and other materials that make it engaging, certainly for middle school and possibly for older elementary students (depending on the lesson).  Of course, some of the material is clearly target