Astronomer Tycho Brahe had a copper nose...

Astronomy, yes. Stargazing, no. Prof. Paul Delaney talks shop to our class on a visit to our campus observatory (he's the director). Unfortunately, the weather was crap. Totally overcast and a bit foggy. Fortunately, we were there mostly to learn about the equipment - telescopes in particular but also some of the other devices. Telescope history and early astronomers is the topic for this week's readings and class. I've known Paul for years but this is the first time I've seen him in his natural habitat. Paul is rarely without his genuine outback hat. I have a couple of hats - on fairly similar. We make up two of the hat gang on the GO train. He brought along a cool replica of Galileo's telescope for us to peer through. We had to settle for peeking at lights and in classroom windows.

Paul is a regular commentator on CTV one of our national broadcast networks. He's frequently summoned to talk about astronomy, shuttle launches, planetary exploration, satellite re-entries, and stuff like that. He's a great chap who hails from Australia but chose to live in these semi-frozen climes. I think he may owe me a dram of Scotch...

The observatory is open to the public on Wednesday nights but on Monday nights they have a live visual stream of what they are observing, a podcast, and a gallery of cool images. Check out the observatory here.

Here Paul discusses the Kepler mission.

The light was dim in the observatory, of course. My iPhone does not handle dim light very well. I put the photo through iPhoto's 'antique' filter which gave it the best contrast. This is one of two observatories and the larger one at that (a 40-inch mirror).

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