No clear skies at all since the last post, I'm desperate to get out so I can test the tracking on the scope.

I decided to sell the Meade, put it on eBay and got £155 for it, it would have been nice to have kept it as a travel scope but I just don't have the room to keep it handy. I'd rather someone else get some use out of it.

It was great to read in the news this week about American plans to return to the moon by 2020, it's a shame that as a race we can't just all get along and not waste so much money on killing each other! We'd have surely made more progress in space by now had we not been waging wars both phoney (as in the Cold War) and the many real conflicts.

The irony though I suppose is that it was the cold war that sparked the Space Race and prompted the US to invest so heavily in order that they could prove they were better than the Soviets!

Anyway I digress, this is not a political blog! The OU course has started but I've not had much time to spend on it lately, I have 2 weeks holiday to take over Christmas so I'm hoping to get on with that then. There seems to be a good spread of people taking the course in terms of experience and knowledge of Astronomy.

More later.
Mitch