I’ve done quite a bit, feel free to ask questions. I still need to get up early and find the bright comet, haven’t seen that one yet, though I’ve seen a couple others recently
I used to like them
but then recently (more like since 2006) my country had issues with lots of pollution from forest fire every year so I kinda gave up and stay home.
I love staring at stars in cloudless night. Definitely a great way to relax and calm your mind from our daily hectic life.
I have ever spent 4 hours to witness a meteor shower about 6 years ago. It was a pretty exciting as you do not know what was coming up. Constantly anticipating for light trails to appear right in front of your eyes. 
I always wonder about other sentient beings looking at their night sky and wondering about the same things we wonder about
Yeah, who are the noisy neighbors at that little yellow star with 13 planets?
How many lumens in a flashlight would it take to be visible from orbit?
heheh, visible from orbit? made me think of this Laser Pointer
But we like gazing to the stars as well.
We had the bloodmoon lately.
I woke the family up when the earth started to cast the shadow on the moon.
We sat cosy covered in blankets on a sofa by the open window on the second floor. Beautifull view on the rd turning moon.
Just received a telescoop and ordered a USB cam piece for it so we are able to view and record via computer.
I am interested but never owned any equipment. Do you guys have any recommendations?
Nice to read about others experiences. I caught a bit of the Geminid meteor shower a few days ago, saw maybe 10 when I was out stargazing .
I have an old Astronomy magazine here, and on the cover it’s says use your computer to find ET. I think you could analyze data for them, (SETI project) at one point, since they had a lot. I think you can still analyze data for some stuff, because they have a lot on some projects
Binoculars have a much wider field of view, so it’s easier to find stuff. Not sure how they’d do in heavy light pollution though. Of course, it’s easier to throw them in a car to get to darker skies, too.
Usually 10x 50 are recommended (you might start with what you already have, if you have binoculars) but I got some 15x70’s a couple weeks after I started using binoculars a lot. Yes, they’re a bit big and heavy, but only 3 lbs. and from rural skies you can see maybe 60-80 objects on the Messier list.
I got the Celestron, so it’s good to learn collimation (more accurately conditional alignment. )
If you want a telescope, I like the Dobsonians. Easy to set up, and generally considered the best bang for the buck. An 8” (diameter )Orion dob is about $350-400 delivered.
Even the cheap, long, white ones (60mm diameter/aperture ) can deliver nice views of planets, though. They are often on lousy mounts, though, and can be hard to use.
Anyway, might be more than you wanted to know!
Thats what inspired my question actually
I did some SETI @ Home years ago, they had it set up for many things, you could do mathematical proofs, treatments for cancer and so forth.
Yeah i had these distributed computerprogramms running a long time ago as well.
And look, it’s still possible to participate (however, it will use resources and thus draw extra power)
Wow Bright Mike, you are referring to the more serious gear.
We got this much simpler one.
We had a plastic one that did not survive the move here and this one is mainly metal and much more sturdy.
We have direct sight of an castle that is 800 meters away, we can see the towers from some windows of our house.
Very cool, we can now see details in the spikes of the towers like we just 2 meters away and which we can’t even see when we are in the courtyard of the place.
Astro-Physics 
but seriously can’t go wrong with binoculars. I still have my 8x56 from years ago even though all of my scopes are gone. if you can mount them on a tripod all the more better.
great, thanks guys. I appreciate all the information here.
I have a few binoculars, thought I need something special. Saw a few expensive telescopes the other day and wasn’t willing to pay that much on a new hobby.
I went to the Mauna Kea visitor information center at 9200 feet a few weeks ago.
The main telescopes are further up the mountain at 14,000 feet and are remote controlled from elsewhere.
It was fantastic !
I’d wanted to go there for years and we had a cloudless sky with no moon. The center’s guides said conditions were as good as it gets.
They held a session with about 8 large optical scopes, from 6:30pm till about 10:30pm, pointing out sky features and explaining astrophysics and some of the history of stars, constellations, clusters, comets, meteors etc. The guides were enthusiastic, knowledgeable and did a great job on the audio presentation.
I took some 8x42 binoculars and was amazed to see some of the northern sky’s things such as the Pleiades and Andromeda.
(I have some 25x100 giants at home in the Southern hemisphere, with a chair and parallelogram mount that I built for them, but had never seen such impressive views.)
If you go to Mauna Kea, it gets very cold, and don’t take a flashlight unless it has a red filter !
I love taking astrophotography, but it’s hard to find time with a toddler at home.
Local college has just relocated its’ observatory and added a second ‘scope (16” I think) to the older 12” unit. They put on monthly ’star gazer’ nights when the weather cooperates. For those interested do a search ‘dark skies star view’ for the best viewing locations.
That sounds great! I’d like to get to the southern hemisphere and see the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, and other objects only visible from, or more easily viewed from, the southern hemisphere.
Interesting that some of you have participated in Seti, I’ve never done that. I don’t know how much flashlight it would take to be seen on the International Space Station which orbits of about 400 kilometers, or the space shuttle, which I think orbited at about 130 miles.
The Miller, that looks like it should work, have you tried Andromeda, or orion nebula? The 8” dob is a bit pricey (mine is smaller, 4.5”), but the 15x70’s were $50 off amazon a few years ago. Sounds like it does pretty well for terrestrial viewing.
Tech, what were you looking for?
Five visible planets appear in a line in the night sky
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-19/five-bright-planets-to-align/7099376
seti@home is currently one of the apps that are run by boinc (berkeley open infrastructure for network computing). many years ago it was a standalone app but boinc was developed as a way to allow other research projects make use of unused processor cycles. There are several astronomy related projects. boinc project list