12th Level Corporate Drone

This and this pretty much describes one part of my life. Enough said.

p.s. If you've never read Order of the Stick or XKCD, you really should!

Risky future

I'm reading Roving Mars by Dr. Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover missions. It's a great read and it gives a good behind-the-scenes account of the MER missions. It's also quite depressing because they come so close to failing so many times. Dr. Squyres started down this path nearly 2 decades ago. He's spent most of his professional life on this and he's one of the fortunate ones in that his planetary mission succeeded in its goals.

Reading his book made me reassess the path I'm on. I've got a good science degree with which I'm making decent money on but I'm also doing my M.Sc. in astronomy on a course-based program. It's very slow because I can't take more than two courses per year as that's all I can handle right now between work, family and education. At the end of it, I will have to try and find a university that will take me in for my doctorial studies. Only when I have my Ph.D in astronomy or astrophysics will I be able to work in that field. I will be in my mid- to late 40's by then. If I make any contributions, it won't be for another decade or two, probably the latter.

If I transition over to astronomy/astrophysics, I will be making far less money than I am right now. I've also got my eye health to consider; I've heard of blind software developers but I only know of exactly one blind astronomer. Astronomy has always been considered a visual field and that assumption will stick regardless of any advances in assistive technologies.

So why am I even down this path? Isn't it smarter to stick with computers, saving my earnings for the time when I'm blind? The honest truth is that I don't know if this is the right path. My heart says "Go for it - this is your dream!" but it doesn't pass any risk analysis of the situation.

For now, I'm going to stick with it. Dreams are great but they can't feed me if I go blind.

Much ado about optics

We are going to a very large star party soon. That means digging out and servicing telescopes that we mothballed since we moved from the US. You would think this is a simple task and it would be.

Except that I have an ungodly number of telescopes.

I've narrowed it down to two that I'm taking: my large Schmidt-Cassegrain and my rather unusual 4" Russian Maksutov-Newtonian. The large SCT is fine - I bought it fairly recently. The Mak-Newt however, gave me quite a bit of trouble since there were many pieces and they weren't all in the same box. Many *many* thanks to my poor long-suffering sis, who was kind enough to help me find the bits needed.

Now, I just need some clear skies so I can get reacquainted with my darlings. I haven't gone out since 2004 - my visual acuity has been deteriorating significantly in the past three years and I am at the point where I can no longer see fine details. This time, I'm resorting to CCD imaging to help me see what's up there. Realistically though, if I continue deteriorating as I am currently, the time will come when I will be blind. I hope that's far far *far* in the future but one can never tell. Meanwhile, I'm going to make and cherish as many happy memories under the night sky as I can. If nothing else, I hope to teach my kids all I know.

We got a Meade DSI CCD camera for me recently (thanks sis!) and it has yet to see first light. I hope to do that within the next two weeks or so. Otherwise, it'll see first light at the star party and that would not be a good thing since I hope to be familiar enough with the CCD to take nice pretty pictures.

Yay! Pretty pictures! :)