Looking for Mars

Last night after Frisbee I was talking to Laura about how nice the weather was (pretty cloudy and not too hot) but how I was sad because I wanted to see Mars tonight (it's really bright--closest to earth it's been in 60,000 years). Then I was telling her about that observatory up in Toele that my boss (Neal) emailed us about. I guess it's an amateur astronomy club, and they're throwing together Mars parties for this entire two week period. So I asked her if, by chance, she wanted to come check it out if the weather cleared up tomorrow. I even warned her about how late the thing would last. To my surprise, she said yes, she wanted to go.

Today I went to work as normal. Then we had ward sports night again, with more volleyball and basketball. It was pretty fun, but I'm having such a hard time getting my volleyball skills back.

Then I went home, showered, and called up Laura. I was half-expecting her to back out, especially when I emphasized how late it might be when we get back. (She's an early sleeper). But I guess with no school right now, she's not too concerned, and she said yes. So I picked her up and we headed up to the observatory. It was about an hour drive. We found it alright, although once we got there we did sort of get lost trying to find the place, but then we found the line. We probably waited for two hours to get through the line. There were a lot of people with small telescopes set up around the observatory, and we later discovered that these were almost just as good, but we were curious about the big telescopes, so we chatted the night away in line. It was kind of cold—I'm glad I wore jeans, but I wish I had worn a sweater or jacket (Laura was smart enough to do that, of course). When we actually got to the telescope, it was kind of disappointing. It was little more than a dot. It was pretty easy to spot the glare from the northern ice caps, but it was hard to make out much of anything else. Anyway, it was still pretty informative and cool. From there, we drove into downtown Salt Lake and stopped at Denny's. I was starved, so I had the usual—chicken fried steak with eggs and gravy. Laura wasn't too hungry and just had biscuits and gravy. It was probably 2:30 by then, and Denny's was crowded with all sorts of interesting figures. After we finished with that, we drove back to Provo, and I dropped her off a little past 3:00. That was a really late date.

Posted August 27, 2003 (11:02 PM) | Comments (1)