Dave & Janelle wrote:

It's currently stormy and snowy here (USA/CO); observing is out of the
question for a while. Here's a fun topic to kick around... what type of
observing do you like better - Solar System or deep-sky?

I'm a definite Solar System observer.

In a very real way, we can divide the Universe up into two pieces: Our Solar
System, and everything else. Or, equivalently, stuff that matters and stuff
that doesn't.

Things outsite our Solar System are interesting only on an abstract,
theoretical basis. We won't interact with them in my lifetime, and probably
not in the lifetimes of my great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids
either. I view deep-sky stuff sometimes... like the Andromeda Galaxy.

Dave don't be so quick to dismiss deep sky objects as non interactive.
Supernovae change in days. One appearing in M31 or in the Milky way will
be exciting indeed.

And as far as deep sky objects go--feast your eye on the star birthing
Orion nebula in the next few months... I can never get enough of those
photons.

Everything in the sky is fascinating! Why try to divide it up. Take an
astronomy class at your local university or community college and learn
about stellar evolution and some on the physics involved in those deep
sky objects... why H-III regions a greater around "O" stars than "B"
stars... what M57 and our sun have in common.


Buy a copy of
"Seeing In The Dark" by Timothy Ferris
Pages 286-287


Perhaps the key to dying well--or living well--is to have laid in a
stock of worthy memories. To that end, when darkness is falling for
good, it is well to have in mind, in addition to memories of human love
and loss and of the natural splendors of this world--of birdsong at
dawn, the roaring spray of the surf, the sweet smell of the air in the
eye of a hurricane, the workings of bees in the throats of
wildflowers--a few memories of the other worlds as well. If you have
seen plasma arches rising off the edge of the Sun, yellow dust storms
raging on Mars, angry red Io emerging from the shadow of Jupiter, the
golden rings of Saturn, the green dot of Uranus, and the blue dot of
Neptune, the glittering star fields of Sagittarius and the delicate
tendrils connecting interacting galaxies, have watched auroras and
meteors writing silent signatures in the sky--if, in short, you have
seen not only this world but something of the other worlds, too--well,
you have lived.

So, while life is in us, and we are in it, let's keep our eyes open.