Did you see the supermoon the other day?

One of the things we got for Xmas was an awesome Telescope. I've always been interested in telescopes and remember wanting one for a really long time. In fact, the first telescope I ever used was a homemade one. I didn't build it myself, but a friend in school did. He got all sorts of cylinders and mirrors and lenses and voila, there's the moon.

But if you want to see a little further than the moon you need to invest a little and get a real refractor telescope. One that can actually show you the rings of Saturn or the spot on Jupiter. The one we ended up getting has a computer on it and once you set it up it will tilt itself automatically and show you pretty much every visible star out there.

My first night out I had the hardest time. I wasn't sure how to align it properly, it was freezing (Xmas) and by the time I was done my nose was running and all I could see was the moon. Which was still pretty awesome because at a large magnification you can really see all the craters and terrain.

The next time, it was slightly warmer and a real clear night. I watched the instructional DVD that came with the thing and figured out what needed to be done. Then all of a sudden, there was Saturn and it's rings. It's pretty freakin' incredible to be able to see that. And very clearly. Then Jupiter and three of its moons. How awesome is that.

I just read an article about the potential for inhabitable planets in the Universe and there's just no way we are the only living form out there. The number of planets being found now is staggering. And this is just from a tiny part of the Universe. Basically they aimed their devices at an empty part of space and came back with billions of stars and planets.

The problem is obviously that we need to figure out a way to move faster than the speed of light in order to get anywhere. And what always blows me away is that the stars we see at night may no longer be there. Since it's taken some of them millions of light years to get their lights here, they may not exist anymore.

Hopefully we run into some aliens that can travel faster than light and don't need to farm us for organs. That would totally suck.

Good night!