(diaryland) December 04, 2005 - 11:24 a.m.

This whole getting out of one's pyjamas thing is pretty freaking hard.

Ever since we whipped out the giant telescope we own out of the garage, which my Dad stole from his school many years ago and then gave to me, and actually SAW Mars and Venus a couple of nights ago, I have turned into an amateur astronomer.

That sentence was badly written, but that's cool.

So, yeah, we saw Mars and Venus. I found out that Venus is really bright because it reflects 65% of the sun's light off it, as it has what we might term a shitload of cloud cover. In our telescope, it looked like a crescent. Mars was way better than I thought it would be. A few years ago, when Mars was really close to earth, we went to see it through the telescope of some hardcore star freaks, and us looking at a reasonably close Mars through our own telescope was kind of similar. It was a bit smaller, but you could still see a few things on the planet. Cool.

I'm really impressed with our telescope. Next year, we will see Saturn and Jupiter. I also really want to check out some galaxies, which we can do any night, but it's too bloody cloudy at the moment.

Also, I got the best progrem off the net. It's unbelievable. It's called Stellarium, and you can get it at www.stellarium.org - it's like you can stand around at any point in the world, at any time of the day, year, whatever, and look around at the night sky. It names everything as well. it blows my mind. My eyes welled up when I first opened it.