Zaurak

My old lady bought me a telescope for Christmas.  Not just any telescope, Astronauts Without Borders Newtonian 130.  The directions explicitly stated, "Put this machine together during the daytime, with plenty of space" and I believe it even said, "sober" but I decided to try it out half-drunk, late at night, in our living room, immediately after opening the gift.

After I removed a spring loaded screw and was not able to reattach it I yelled angrily and stormed about until my Old Lady was upset as well.  Merry Christmas!

The next morning dear old Dad helped me reattach the screw.  Meanwhile, I had emailed Astronauts Without Borders (AWB henceforth) and received further instruction from the President of the company.  How cool is that. I was collimated and ready to shoot the moon.

Unfortunately, we are in the part of the moon cycle where she is the least visible, so we had to wish for a star.  My wife and I are essentially virgin astronomers, and we once again found ourselves half drunk, but this time the scope was working.  Using the lower powered, wider angled eyepiece we were able to focus in on clumps of stars.

Even without the scope by looking out the bedroom window we could see one star right in front of us, really outshining the others.  We used our cell phone app that maps the sky and determined it had the Bayer designation, aka lame star name, of Gamma Eridani, but was also traditionally known as a slick Arabic word for boat, Zaurak.

We were able to locate Zaurak using the high powered eyepiece.  On Zaurak's wikipedia page it says the red giant star is over 200 light years away from us.  What the fuck is a light year?

A light year is the distance light can travel (about 186,000 miles per second) in one year, or about six trillion miles.

Last night we looked at a star that is (six trillion multiplied by 200) miles away.  My old lady bought me a telescope for Christmas but what she really gave me was Light, Space, Time, the entire fucking Universe.