2) I for one welcome our new cosmic coat hanger overlords!

Yes if were home, I’d be able to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge too. But I’m in Perth , Western Australia with family. But you know what? I can still remember it after three days away, and I concur that the star cluster DOES remind me of a coat hanger. Easily. And we still hear our bridge referred to as a coat hanger. Doesn’t worry me a bit either.

Ivan.

Happy monkey everyone.

I guess it takes a lot more visual skill than I have to be an astronomer.”

Yeah, me too… I can vaguely see a hook fo the hanger, but then it’s just more or less a straight-line bar across under it.

What kind of weird coathangers are you using, Phil?

Wow, I never knew that about Burnham. How sad. I grew up poring over those books. My copies are so dog-eared and marked up you can hardly read the text. But I wouldn’t part with them for anything.

Wow. Just…lower case wow.

The really sad part is all the time he spent putting together slide shows with narration and music (with an actual slide projector, and an 8-track player (that’s those old cartridges, not an 8-track studio machine!)) to play for the visitors at Lowell, all while being actively discouraged in this endeavor by his boss. And then, only a few years after he was laid off, the new observatory director decided (correctly, IMO) to emphasize outreach, even building a shiny new visitor center. A few years earlier and Burnham would have been just the guy to run it.

Hey Alanis, that‘s irony.

It’s a clear signal from our so-loved CoatHanger GOD!! YAY!

Don’t you mean the Great Goddess Joan Crawford? “No wire hangers!” (Explanations available, for the cinematically challenged.)

@ Johnny:

That’s cool! I still use all three editions. The finder charts are great! As I recall, it took me about a year to save up my paper route money to buy all three volumes.

Click my name for model coathanger if you can’t see it.

Glad to hear someone still uses it. Too bad Bob never made much money from it. (Dover doesn’t do royalties, just one-time payments.)

As for the people not seeing the coathanger, click through to the APOD image. It’s much clearer there.

But if you own a small telescope, I think the very best thing you can do is dress warmly, go outside, and just have fun. You have a magnificent tool in your hands that people centuries ago would have cheerfully gone to war over, and all you have to do is go outside.

I was given one forty-some years ago, a 40X Newtonian (don’t recall diameter, do recall eyepiece magnification).

I saw the mountains on the Moon all by myself. I watched Mars quiver and waver through a humid summer sky. And I first saw the Orion Nebula on a frigid winter night when Eisenhower was in office and there were whispers everywhere about going way up into the sky.

It was fun doing it then and it is at least as much fun remembering those moments now. Thanks for the reminder.