To The Moon And Beyond

We have been tidying up the belly of our motor home while camped here in Congress, AZ.  One rule of thumb is that if you haven’t used a particular item within the last year then it is time to get rid of it.  We have rid ourselves of a number of things here leaving them on the donation table in the clubhouse.

But there was one item we were loathe to shed – our telescope.  I received the telescope as my last big anniversary present at Ford.  They reached the point on the anniversary gifts where they just handed you a catalog and told you to pick the item you wanted.  I picked a telescope as it was something we thought we would use while out camping.

We tried setting it up before we loaded it into the motor home to go fulltiming, but we didn’t know quite what we were doing and so we really never had it set up.  And for nearly two and a half years now we have been procrastinating about using it.

We invited Ranger Steve and his service dog Jin of Escapees internet forum fame over for dinner one night.  Ranger Steve said he would bring along his telescope and after dinner we would have a good look at Jupiter which he said was about the brightest thing in the night sky right now.  That lead to a conversation about how we weren’t using our telescope and he volunteered that he would help us get it set up.

Gary set up our telescope as best he could and Ranger Steve dialed in the setup for us, and without a whole lot to it.  Here we hadn’t been using it over a failed setup that was very easily rectified.  Soon, we were looking at craters on the moon and observing five of the many moons orbiting around Jupiter.

So the telescope is not going to be one of the items to leave the motorhome’s belly.  But we did discover through Ranger Steve that there are these reflecting telescopes such as the one he uses that through a whole series of mirrors greatly reduces the overall size of the unit and makes them much easier to pack away.  It could be time for another Craigslist buy and sell.