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Post by phoenix on Jan 20, 2007 1:00:31 GMT
Hi all,
After a few posts I twigged that I had not really introduced myself. As with most amateurs I was smitten as a child. My father used to show me the constellations and my great Uncle had a pair of 10x50 binos. I lived in the country and was used to growing up with dark skies so I never really thought much about it. I went to Uni and then got a job in the mineral exploration industry and spent 11 years overseas. At one point I was going to Mozambique and a friend bought me a very good sky guide for the Southern Hemisphere. At this point I swore that once I was settled I would get a good set up and make the most of our intermittant skies. I am now back where I was born and the clear skies are not quite as good as they used to be but I hope to make up for lost time.
Kieran
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Post by eamonnpkeyes on Jan 21, 2007 22:41:47 GMT
I started off with 10x50s too...provided by an uncle...back in the late 1960s. Skies even in Belfast were pretty good then. Going out the back of the house was an entry into a black void where I regularly used to chart the motion of Jupiter's 4 major moons, the variability of Algol, and stare for hours at the Milky Way, which was more often than not visible...and that was all in North Belfast.
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Post by paulevans on Jan 22, 2007 8:22:30 GMT
Welcome Kieran,
So you, like me, have seen the southern sky. Good innit? One of these days I shall do a talk about it. Part of the reason I'm here is that my childhood interest in astronomy was rejuvenated when, during a trip to Australia in 2002, I visited an observatory in the evening and a kind gent showed me 47 Tucanae through his 15" Dob. It remains quite the most amazing sight I've ever seen! A year later I moved from London to Northern Ireland and found that there were indeed objects below the first magnitude in the sky!
Paul.
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