oh be a fine girl, kiss me

got new binoculars. they see FAR. they're 16x50's, so that's quite a bit of light gathering power.
i enjoy gathering light.
so yeah, spying on the neighbors has gotten old real quick (this 'hood is boring), so i've turned my lenses skyward...
jupiter is easy to discern as a disc, not a star, and i can even make out two of the four galilean satellites, Ganymede and Europa (the two brightest, incidentally)
the moon is cool. i can see enough detail to note slight changes in its phase from one hour to the next!
saturn is cool, but i can't really discern rings. it's obviously it (i can read a starchart better than you), with it's dusty ochre colour and blobby shape (because of the rings i can't quite make out).
i'm really impressed with all that i can see with these things. i can see stars down to magnitude 10 or 12, i think. at least, i'm seeing stars that don't appear on my charts (which go down to mag. 8). the human eye can see magnitude 6 stars on an exceptionally clear night with no lights, but in the city, we're lucky to see down to magnitude 2.5 or 3. some nights we don't see squat.
i can't wait to check out the pleiades and andromeda!
ps: the magnitude scale, for those who don't know, goes in reverse, so brighter stars have lower numbers, and dimmer stars have higher numbers. it used to be that the brightest star (sirius) was set to 0, but then they figured out that the scale was off in the mid-20th century and fixed it so that sirius and some other stars had to have negative numbers. so that's that confusing mess. i didn't even go into apparent magnitude versus absolute magnitude or spectral classes of stars and the effect it has on both apparent and absolute magnitude. i'm sure you wouldn't care for such things.

i also got a bunch of new cd's, and i'm having trouble deciding which ones to listen to first... i've already gone through some ultramarine, thievery corporation, and the new moby album, all of which i've loved. ooh ooh, AND the new lemon jelly release!! joy!
maybe the sloth will agree to help me listen to a bunch of these during my visit.
fun stuff.

ah the weather. what needs to be said about that? nothing, except: pinch me.
pittsburgh w/o rain or clouds is uncommon enough, but this latest bout of nice, clear weather has been downright strange. but i'm enjoying the strangeness, as i always enjoy a certain amount of strange. except for that particular strange that i can't stand, and that other one that just plain creeps me out. you know the type.

later.