Binoculars

I'm not much of an observational astronomer. I like thinking about the big questions of cosmology and cosmogony (not deeply or incisively, but I still think about them) but I find peering through a telescope damned frustrating. There's always something something wrong. The eyepiece is wrong and I have to rest my actual cornea on it. Or the eyepiece is in the wrong place and I have to bend myself up like a paperclip to get my eye to it. Or the mirror is covered with dew. Or it's hot. Or it's cold. Or there's a huge flying bug plaguing me. Or I can't see the star chart. Or I can't Hercules with both hands and radar.

I'm more the binocular type. I go out with the binoculars, I have a look around, I see star clusters and globular clusters, I go back inside. Neat, clean, tidy, uplifting, and just about as much astronomy as I care to do on any given night. (Not that there's anything wrong with telescopes, or astronomy as a serious hobby, but I've dabbled enough to know that binoculars are about my speed.)

Only I can't find my binoculars. They were good ones too. I paid a small fortune for them and they featured lenses about the size of dinner plates (well, small dinner plates). They were designed for backyard astronomy, and they were good at it. But I fear that right now, they're serving as traction for a Caterpillar D9N dozer at the local landfill. I must have thrown them away, though I have no memory of doing so, and can't imagine that I ever would have in my right mind.

Ah, my right mind. That explains that.

So the other day I did a little on-line browsing for binoculars, thinking I would perhaps replace the missing pair with something new, shiny, and optically perfect. Then I laughed. Here I am, functioning with one eye, buying binoculars? I'd have more luck taping a smallish refractor to my head. To be monocular in a binocular world - it sounds like a song, or an epic poem, or the lament of a dude with shingles in his eye.

But today my eye just started working again, just like that. No double vision, reasonably clear eyesight! What a pleasure to drive with both eyes! And what a pleasure to once again be able to think about binoculars again. Heaven knows what happened last night. Did my eye swelling go down to the point that my brain could make sense of the information again? Or what? Either way, it's greatly heartening to have two eyes again, even if it does take my right eye about four seconds to change major focus, and another second or two to track in so the double vision resolves. The fact that there's been improvement seems to argue that there'll be more improvement.

I actually do have a telescope. It's an antique 4.5-inch refractor and it's a lovely instrument to look at, all varnished wood and polished brass. It looks like the kind of beautiful hand-made instrument an 18th Century astronomer would have used, and it works about as well too. There's no focusing rack; you focus it by sliding a brass tube in and out of the back of the thing. Looking at any kind of reasonably bright source produces an orgy of colored auras. It's big, and the solid brass equitorial mount alone weighs about 40 pounds, and even mounted on the sturdiest pipe I could find (cast iron sewer pipe embedded in about three feet of concrete) the thing jiggles and shivers uncontrollably.

I took the old eyepiece to an astronomy shop and not even The Guy Behind The Counter could identify it. He eventually decided that it was a Fossl, a play on Plossl. So I bought a new eyepiece, a relatively low-power Plossl. I got to the point I could see stuff through it, but the endless vibration and the difficulty in focusing the thing finally convinced me that it was best suited as a piece of novel indoor decor.

Anyhow. The telescope remains in my office, and meantime, now that my eyes work, I'm going to go look for binoculars.