I am so excited

Some of you may know that it's dark out where I live, well not so much today because the moon is bright and you can really tell the difference in the phases of the moon when that's the only light you see, but I degress...Flagstaff is the first international dark sky city and home to Lowell Observatory (they discovered Pluto) and Bryan and I live 30 miles away though very rural national forest. Since we have no utilities the light polution that we have is very minimal. I have some amazing night skys and Bryan gave me a telescope for Christmas. Now this was a perfect gift, not only do we have amazing night skys, and interest in astronomy, but this is a gift I've wanted since 3rd grade. 3rd grade people! My husband is wonderful and I am blessed.

Now don't worry this wasn't a post to just to praise Bryan, it does have a purpose. We set up the telescope and went on earthsky.org and found out that we could see jupiter, mercury, and venus tonight. So we checked it out and actually did get to see them. Venus had a halo around it which was pretty cool and Jupiter was big and red. I didn't get to see the cloud bands but we're still learning :). Then at around 8:00 tonight the wind died down and I took out the telescope (it was sitting in our kitchen for the first viewing, because of the cold and the wind). I was able to see the craters on the moon and with my star chart I was able to identify Orion (I knew that one before) Cetus, known as the sea monster or whale, The Phoenix, Eridanus, known as the river, Lepus, the hare, and Fornax, the furnace. I love learning new things.

Christmas Break was good for Bryan and I. We saw lots of family and friends, ate some scrumptious rootbeer ribs that we helped my dad make, and even got to do a little off-roading washed down with some Burger House Burros and Doc Holiday. I finished knitting all of my christmas gifts and am almost finished with the back of a sweater and hopefully one sock. I swear I will finish them this year :) So far 2009 looks like a great year and hopefully we will reach all of our goals.