Doing Domes

The 20-inch Refractor at the Chabot Center

Regular readers (or anyone who knows me) will confirm that I love visiting Space Places; observatories, planetaria, museums featuring space themes, etc, etc. Its been a fairly consistent theme in my life--if it has anything to do with astronomy, space travel or related subjects I just can't walk past without a look-see.

Up til now this obsession has been pursued in a random, careless fashion. Ill stop by a planetarium in a city I happen to be visiting or an observatory that my route takes me near. This is how I visited the Chabot Center and Palomar in California, Kitt Peak in Arizona and Cranbrook Institute in Michigan.  Its also how Lucy and I came to Green Bank just last month. I’ve been to quite a few Space Places in the course of a lifetime of fascination with the skies and what we can experience of them, but not in any kind of organized manner.

This changes now.

Beginning today, I'm upping my game. From here on out, my intention is to conduct a more focused program, seeking-out and checking-out those great telescopes in their secluded domes, those all-sky projectors, those launch sites and support facilities amenable to visitation.

If a planetarium lies in a town a am visiting, I will make every effort to get there. If an observatory can be reached with a realistic side-trip off the Interstate, Ill give it my best shot. And if a space-related historic site is anywhere near—then I’m there as well.

It’s a quest, you see. Ill never be able to visit all the domes, climb all the mountains, travel to all of the sites where big rockets roar aloft, but I can try.  It should be a lot of fun.