A telescope is cheaper than a bottle of blood-pressure medicine
Today we’ll begin with our new $20 telescope — the Galileoscope, developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. We ordered it about a month ago (the price has since gone up to $30) and have had it for about a week. Almost all of which has been cloudy. But we did get a chance to look at the moon one night, and it was AWESOME! The telescope comes as parts, which you assemble — using available lesson plans if you’d like to learn more about lenses and so on. Takes about a half hour. And the result is a telescope, like what Galileo used (except his was probably a brass body instead of plastic) that mounts to your camera tripod (Galileo probably didn’t have a camera tripod) and can show you Saturn’s rings. To be more specific, if you’re a tech type, it’s a 50 mm, 25 – 50 power, achromatic refractor. Or, as I like to say, it makes far away stuff look really close. Here you can see some good, as well as some bad, pictures people have taken through Galileoscopes. I’ve also gotten a good look at the Pleiades and at Venus. I just want to repeat that it’s AWESOME, and it cost us less than a meal out. Now for a microscope…
In other news, we got another 8-10″ of snow over the last 36 hours. The sky cleared sometime before 1:00 a.m. and the combination of bright snow and full moon caused daylight conditions outdoors. It was just incredible, and I wished it wasn’t 15 degrees, so that I could sit out on the back deck with our aforementioned Galileoscope, a mug of hot chocolate, and an iPod loaded with something rich and pretty like The Low Anthem. Ah, Spring, tarry not on thy appointed rounds!
Yesterday I heard an interview with a cardiologist, Dr. Mimi Guarneri, who is the co-founder and the medical director of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine. She had some great advice for people who want to live long, healthy lives. As I write, “for people who want to live long, healthy lives,” I feel a little silly and wonder if it might be an unnecessary phrase. But it isn’t. It’s pretty clear how much priority the average American puts on health, and it’s nowhere near the priority the average American puts on making money and being entertained. So the phrase remains. Anyway, the focus of her work is on preventative medicine, keeping people from getting to the point where they need cardiac interventions and pharmaceuticals. She recommends looking to societies where people commonly live long lives and seeing what their lives are like. Here are some of her recommended characteristics for a healthy life: healthy diet, active lifestyle, involvement in nature, meditation, positive outlook, strong sense of community, volunteering. She also noted that your chance of having a heart attack goes up nearly 250% when you are angry. There you go. We need to simplify, form strong communities, strengthen our bonds to the natural world, empower ourselves so that we feel engaged and positive about the future, care for our bodies and our minds, and help one another. I recommend checking out Dr. Guarneri’s website, and I’m going to add it to our links bar.
I’ll close with a photo of last week’s ice storm.
things always look so beautiful after an ice storm!