I Know how Ford Prefect Felt

I have discovered that I was insane to think I could find a spotting scope that would enable me to see .17 HMR holes in a target 300 yards away. That’s a bummer. I guess this is why people shoot prairie dogs. They’re like little furry Shoot-N-Cs. They’re a certain size before you shoot them, and then they expand and maybe cartwheel on impact, confirming your accuracy. That’s decent of them.

Trail Glades is only a hundred yards long, and they have no prairie dogs. However they do have iguanas. I was shooting a few weeks back, and I saw motion in front of me, and when I looked down, a very disturbed ten-inch-long iguana was looking up at me from a position between me and my target. He took off before anyone could nail him. Which was a good thing, because he wasn’t even big enough to make a decent corn dog.

I am still waiting to see a python out there.

While I was looking at scopes, I discovered something else. Some scopes are actually telescopes. Yes, I realize that any spotting scope is technically a telescope. But some models are sold to amateur astronomers (and perverts) as well as shooters. Naturally, I ended up looking at telescopes.

I can’t believe how they’ve changed. For a relatively low price, you can get a telescope that will allow you to see Jupiter’s stripes.

Looking at telescopes made me sad. It made me miss my mother. When I was a kid, she bought me a Tasco refractor. I believe this was not too long before the Comet Kohoutek fizzle. I used to set it up in my backyard, and I looked at Jupiter and Saturn and Venus and the moon. She would come out and sit in a patio chair and smoke Viceroys and look at the things I found. She really enjoyed that. It’s kind of neat to see for yourself that Saturn really has those funny rings. My dad was not big on spending time with kids, and he spent way too much time in the house, watching TV. But my mother had a wonderful natural curiosity, which she probably learned from her father.

Soon after I got my telescope, Mike decided he had to have one, too. His parents got him one, and we used to take our telescopes down to the bay and look at boats and islands and Miami Beach.

So now I want a telescope. I’m not going to buy one, but I want one. It would cost about four hundred bucks, and I would use it twice.

I have no idea what happened to my telescope. I guess it disappeared along with my oil paints. When you come from a broken home, you lose a lot of stuff stable families manage to keep. There is a lot of moving around, and every time, something gets lost or stolen, or there just isn’t room for it.

The problem with amateur astronomy, as I see it, is that there are about five things up there you can hope to get a good look at, and once you’ve seen them, you’ve seen them. They would cost me eighty dollars apiece. That’s a bit steep.

I rooted around on the web for amateur astronomy photos. Mostly, they’re not great. The resolution is not high. But some are interesting. It’s possible to take shots of the international space station as it crosses in front of the moon and the sun. That makes for some fun photos. Here’s a space station shot, if you want to see what I mean.

Am I the only one who finds space frustrating? When I was a kid, they used to wheel TVs into school classrooms so we could see live video from Apollo missions. Then the shuttle was interesting for a while, and then the government decided to cancel the program. I think it’s because we realized there was no way we were going anywhere else. Mars, maybe, but if we want to go farther than that, we’re going to have to make discoveries that change our understanding of physics considerably. If we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take over eight years to visit the nearest star and return, and it’s not like we could land there and look around. Maybe I’m wrong; do we know if Proxima Centauri has planets?

We realized we were not going to be getting phasers and transporters any time soon, and we were not going to get to shoot Klingons with our photon torpedoes. That had to suck a lot of the wind out of the space program’s sails. Even if it was solar wind.

Frontiers used to be much less intimidating. Once man learned how to sail, we were able to go just about anywhere. Scholars claim the Vikings and the Chinese made it across the Atlantic before Columbus. Whether they did or not, we were sailing all over the Old World many centuries ago. The Apostle Paul had no trouble getting from Israel to Italy and maybe Spain. We figured out how to travel anywhere on the planet, and then we managed to get into space, and then we landed on the moon. And then we looked past the moon and realized we had reached a point of very sharply diminishing returns. We were at the edge of a very deep moat. It’s hard to get excited about spending a big percentage of your tax revenues to go to a couple of crummy little planets from which you can bring back nothing of value.

It’s not breaking out of Alcatraz that kills you. It’s the swim to San Francisco. That pretty much describes how space travel works, if Proxima Centauri is San Francisco.

Maybe we have reached a point where practical efforts are of much less use than theoretical research. If we study and improve physics long enough, maybe an answer will come to us, and after that, building the means will start to make sense. But we aren’t going to get anywhere shooting comparatively slow rockets up there over and over. I wonder how much energy it takes to push a ship eight light years, within a human lifetime. For all I know, it requires a chunk of fuel the size of the earth. Maybe God has provided a key, and we can find it if we look long enough and hard enough.

In any case, I guess I can forget spotting my own shots at 300 yards.