I've heard Jupiter is overrated anyway

Last Saturday night was one of those nights that didn't turn out quite how we had imagined it.

We had a reservation to camp out in a small regional park which happens to be right near Oakland and even more importantly right near the Chabot* Space Center and Observatory. Chabot is particularly neat because up on the roof they have several enormous telescopes that they open up to the public on Friday and Saturday nights after dark.

Our brilliant plan was in place: go set up camp, drive over to check out the telescopes, and then head back to the campsite for a fire, some late-night smores and to sleep under the stars. What a great evening!

Almost. A few unexpected snags got in the way, some of which were my fault. Others of which were not. Most of the ones that were my fault involve us getting lost, which we did more than once, and which I will not discuss in any detail here for obvious reasons.

Thus the story begins while we were turning around and trying to get on the right highway heading the right way, and I called the campsite to confirm that the google maps directions were actually going to work. They weren't: it hadn't taken into account the different gates and the one we had to enter at for the campground was on the far side of the park. Further, the "road" that google said we could drive on through the park to get to the observatory was a phantom and we would have to drive out and around to get there. Then the final blow: gate to the campsite locked at 10pm. No entry after that even if all your stuff was there.

It became clear that we had to choose: telescopes or camping? Which did we want more?

Telescopes.

So we turned around again and went away from the campground towards the telescopes. We got there just before dark and after chasing exiting families around the parking garage trying to get their parking spots (we were not the only ones doing this, and we were clearly not the best at it as we kept getting beat and missing out on the spots), we finally secured a parking spot and headed up to check out the scopes.

As we could have suspected from the parking garage mayhem, we were not the only people who had had this idea. There were hundreds of people up there, most of them in one of the lines for the various telescopes. We immediately got into a line, and then started wondering exactly how long this line was going to take. It was very dark. We stood there and the line moved very, very slowly. The longer we waited the hungrier we got, but also the more invested we got and so we stayed and stayed well past any rational person's willingness to wait in line to see...a star cluster. That's right: we spent an hour standing in line to look through a little hole and see a small grouping of bright white dots against a black background.

Only too late did we learn that one of the other lines was for a telescope that was looking at Jupiter.

On the way out there was also a small telescope set up that was looking at the Moon. We each took a peak and were totally blown away at how clearly you could see detail on the Moon's surface. It was amazing. It almost made up for waiting an hour to see a cluster.

Starving and disappointed, we proceeded to get lost on the way home and ended the night eating pizza at 11pm at a place near our apartment. Then we unpacked our camping stuff and went to sleep in our own bed. We'd seen enough stars for one night anyway.


*Sha-BO, in case you were tempted to make it rhyme with the Vermont cheddar cheese makers.