Telescope Reviews: Front Yard Astronomy

I enjoyed this article and I loved George Carlin. He was always very truthful in his jokes. He surely saw the light during his time. Speaking of light though, I do agree, it would be nice to have black skies but one thing astronomers do a bad job of on their own is trying to educate the public on what they're actually seeing. For example, about 80% of my observing is in heavily light polluted skies and it hasn't stopped me. I think this is why I love Burnham's Celestial Handbook so much. Burnham spoke a lot about stars and it helped me through all the years. During a recent star party in light polluted skies, I was showing a few observers a double star in Draco in my 6" refractor. I explained that it was 760 light years away and explained what light years were. Then I told them the stars had a common proper motion in space and that they were 886 AU's apart. Then I explained what all that meant. That was all somewhat helpful until I used the Voyager spacecraft as en example. I explained that Voyager has barely traveled 120 AU's. I explained that Voyager has only traversed about 1/7th the distance they were seeing between these two, faint stars. Think of all the complexity of the human race, all taking place within a fraction of this space. Then I told them to look at the entire sky so they could grasp how much more space there is out there. Sure, it was light polluted, but people were absolutely awestruck at the site of those tiny stars after they understood that. For the first time, they really had a sense of scale and they kept staring at them just totally blown away. Those are the kind of descriptions that can make a light polluted sky an interesting place. The other problem are these monotonous observing companions with nothing but visual descriptions. How can anybody truly appreciate what they're seeing if they don;t even understand what they're seeing? I don't blame people for not being intrigued by astronomy sometimes. Observers don't spend enough time educating the public by finding more interesting ways of making astronomy fascinating. Also, let people know that the Moon an planets are no better in darker skies, in fact I explain that they usually look worse. Any amateur astronomer who doesnt understand that is proof of what I'm talking about. You don't encourage beginners by telling them there's little to view in the city. Anyway, great article.