Why do I have a telescope?

Back in April I went on an Open University summer school to Mallorca to do some astronomy. It was an excellent course, by far the best the OU do and even more fun because I ended up passing with a distinction. The course description is here and although you need to organise travel, accommodation is all included in the price.

What was interesting though was that you don't spend a lot of time looking through a telescope, well only twice over the whole week. That's because while it's a course that works with visible light, all of it is done using some very expensive CCD cameras or a spectrograph attached to laptops. So there we were, using equipment that probably cost a total of something like £15,000 in purpose built domes under clear dark skies. And it was nice and warm as well. We even saw a meteor shower. And while it was hard work - you start at 6PM and work through to closing the dome down at 4AM the following morning - it was also huge fun.

And that's the problem, Astronomy's fun and addictive. Once you do it, you want to do it again.