2015 – The Writing Life of a Tadpole

2015 – Update on my goals at the end of the year

January 1 2016

Well, it’s the last day of the year, and time to take stock of my goals for the year. I enter my “taking stock” phase with two massively competing paradigms — epic failure for failing to complete or even start many of them vs. satisfaction for the progress I’ve made on some of them.

For blue / mind / organizing / planning goals, my two big ones for the year were to do more on astronomy and a kitchen renovation. For the astronomy, I am really happy with the new alignment procedure I have, and the new “wifi” tool. They basically “saved” my interest in astronomy, and I’m much more confident now that I can use my telescope to find things that are actually worth finding. That’s a huge achievement, and it worked well. I was a bit surprised that I lost steam in September, and barely used my scope all fall. I didn’t have much luck with my Canon T5i being attached, but I think I need to find someone who has experience taking pics to walk me through the setup and use. I’m just not figuring out the focus right. I’m not looking for “wow” factor, I’m just looking to snap some basic shots of what I see through the scope. For the kitchen renovation, it is done. In June I said we were “back on track”, but that was before the schedule went way off the rails and the stress kicked in. I am happy it’s done, and later this weekend we’ll do some organizing to fix up a bit of the configuration. Call it maybe 3/5 for astronomy and 5/5 for home reno. For various other blue commitments:

Tracking my to do list didn’t take hold as well as I had hoped (2/5);
Scanning was wiped out completely by refocus on uploading digital files to the website instead (0/5);
Backups were probably 0/5 up until yesterday when I did full backup of Andrea and my computer (4/5);
I haven’t done anything on photography, knitting, juggling, origami or a meteor shower (0/5); and,
For courses, I completed some more of the video games through Coursera, and registered in the psych course at Carleton, but most of my “study” time has been devoted to French for the last month when I was trying to get studying going again (1/5).

For the green / emotion commitments, my two big commitments were better engagement with Jacob and random acts of romance. For Jacob, the “nights with Dad” were a bust for the “activity” side of things, but he does like going out for dinner with me. Two things that were a hit? Hockey cards and Lone Star. Call it maybe 3/5. For the random acts of romance, I’ve been a deadbeat husband. Call it 0/5. Sigh. The start of the year started out okay with things like flowers and stuff, but by the end of the year, survival mode kicked in around August and I was just waiting to the end of the year on most things, which doesn’t leave me much green energy for emotive behaviour — that’s not an excuse, just an analysis of some of my internal failure.

For other activities, I did a few wing nights with the guys, but honestly, I’m the only one who organizes them, only 1 or 2 tend to come, it’s a hassle to try and pick a night when people are free even if I announce a month in advance, and while I enjoy it, it’s not worth the personal investment. I end up enjoying the people’s company who come, but disappointed that others aren’t interested. Without seeming like a pathetic loser, I wish I had more guy friend outings. I don’t “need” them, I’m too much of an introvert for that, just wish they were more spontaneous. I’ll comment more on this a bit below on another issue. On siblings, I have changed direction considerably. I was hoping to reach out more, but I honestly haven’t had the emotive energy the last six months. My one brother is spiraling, and I don’t know how to help him even if he would accept help, which he won’t; the one sister and I haven’t seen much of each other this year, just busy; and the brother in town I see even less. We skipped the corn roast party in August due to the kitchen renovation, I did some relatively minimal website support for my friend on his AstroPontiac campaign (although little for me to do lately), and I had a charity hack idea that I decided to just drop for now. It intrigues me, but too much work, not even enough resonance with me. Call all of it 0/5.

Not surprisingly, the lack of emotive energy was on full display in Peterborough over Xmas. I am not a social being by nature, and being around extra people was draining of the little energy I had left for the year. I was burned out getting to the Xmas holiday break, and really needed to recharge. That hasn’t really happened yet. I don’t get energized by emotion/social/leadership activities, the only thing that builds me back up quick is analytical / organizational work. Part of my plan for Monday (I’ll blog more about that later) but I’m glad Andrea was patient with me over Xmas…I found myself hiding out in the bedroom way more than I would normally, just to get away from people. I got some new puzzle games for my phone, and that helps too (building up my analytical energy).

However, my epic green failure for this year though was my plans for a giant project in November. I kept most of the details secret as I worked out the various issues, and it went belly up in about March/April. It was basically an awareness campaign around prostate cancer, and I did a lot of the early prep work. Enough to realize it wasn’t going to work. So I killed the campaign. I have a new idea for the coming year, one with more of a guarantee of going ahead but also with less payoff other than awareness. Time will tell if I pursue it or not, haven’t done my planning for the new year yet. About 2/5 overall, and that’s being generous.

For the red / physical / directional commitments, most of it was around being more active. That took a large backseat to some other stuff although I tried to maintain my back exercises and yoga stretches. Walking was a no, no new dentist or doctor, did do my sleep test, no for rappelling or zipline, and I’ve ditched the the polar plunge option for this year. Call all of that a big 0/5 across the board, although with some promising things in place for the new year. The one positive development of late in the red side was career-related, as I’ve been doing a lot more french work of late than previously, and I have a game plan for January onward. Quite happy with that, although far from formal progress I suppose. Call it 2/5 at best.

For the yellow / creative commitments, the giant overarching commitment was to write 500,000 words this year. Actually, that was my big commitment for the year and I came out of the corner swinging. Active blogs on development, personal experiences with Jacob, reviews of TV premieres — lots of different topics. When I ditched the “campaign” goal above in green, that killed any chance of likely reaching my writing goal for the year since much of that writing was going to be for the campaign. No campaign, no corresponding word count, and I didn’t replace it with another goal. I took the hit for it above, but I didn’t want to take the hit for it in my writing goal too, so I modified my goal partway through the year. My goal was to take my website of about up to 500K words worth of content. Not including this post, I’m going to finish off with a wordcount of around 400K, with another 25K in the pipeline. My carryover from the previous year started at 200K, dropped to 100K with a change in website design, and so about 300,000 words for the year. That is far less than my goal, but six times what I’ve ever written before. That number floors me, and despite the “shortfall”, I’m giving myself full marks for it of 5/5. I kicked ass.

Sort of…here’s the issue, and it applies to regular Facebook posts, tweets (1400+ this year, most of which were TV episode reviews), memes (200), quotes, comics sharing, and the Creativity Challenge:

Zero take-up.

I have written blogs where I poured my heart and soul into them, shared them with friends. Nada. Zilch. Rien. Nothing. Crickets chirping. Oh, sure, people read the posts, or at least opened the page. My web trackers tell me they did. Not in astronomical numbers, but a few here and there. Sometimes a couple of dozen. It’s not like I’m writing stuff for the masses, so I’m not looking for huge feedback or anything. But take the memes I was doing…some were kind of cute. 0 shares. On a good day, a couple of likes. No comments. No interactions hardly at all. Much of the year translated into shouting into a void. Let’s be clear, I’m not looking for love here. I’m looking for resonance, some sort of metric that says someone read it and thought it was at least interesting, or well-written, or even embarassingly bad. I don’t care, just something that changes it from writing in a diary and sharing things online. Like with the wing nights I mentioned above. Some sort of resonance with someone. Some basic connection.

It goes back to the basic question of who I am writing for, and while that remains nominally and predominantly myself, as I don’t write for the market and never will, whatever I’m doing, I’m not reaching ANYONE. My HR guide still remains popular, and it came together nicely for the first few chapters and I can see the rest as it’s forming, just need to find the time when I actually have the energy to write. But more importantly, I have to come to terms with my writing having zero resonance in its current form. Overall, I’ll give myself 5/5 for doing the work, and 1/5 for having it be relevant to anyone, average of 3/5, which is probably generous.

Where does that leave me for the year?

Category	Big ticket items	Little ticket items
Blue	4 / 5	1 / 5
Green	1.5 / 5	0 / 5
Red	1 / 5	0 / 5
Yellow	5 / 5	3 / 5
Overall Rating	2.875 / 5	1 / 5

Of course, I’m trying not to be completely anal about the year being less than productive since life is about balance and change, and lots of things happened over the course of the year to change the experience on the battlefield. I didn’t get to the Photobooks, but I did completely revamp 4 websites for a new hosting platform. I didn’t get to my passport renewal or compare costs between grocery stores, but I did cut the cord on cable and make a bunch of improvements to technology services in my life. I didn’t do as much studying as I wanted to, but I did figure out the list. I didn’t spend as much time with friends, but I’m better at spending time with myself again. I didn’t do as much community work, but I am now helping with a website for another community group. I didn’t give blood, but that is partly a problem with the damn blood services people being unable to answer a couple of basic questions easily, and I can’t do it at a regular blood drive — Amazon calls it removing friction from transactions, but the blood drive people have their limits that I haven’t pushed past yet. I didn’t do my exercises much this year, but I also hurt myself twice when I started doing them, so that didn’t take. Sure, I didn’t do my movie extravaganza weekend, but I did do Pop Expo again. Reading started off huge for the year, and I binge read a ton of stuff in March (enough for the year), even if it wasn’t the list I intended. Crime and Punishment stopped me cold so I have to get that going again. Ditched the spiritualism and gratitude journal, but we are at least saying grace more regularly. Recipes went out the window for my involvement, but Andrea did a bunch of new ones we tried for Epicure in the fall and some were good enough to add to the rotation. Balance, trade offs. They happen.

I said at the beginning that I was smack dab in the middle of two competing paradigms. The first is the “epic failure” idea, i.e. that I did so poorly on my ambitious agenda to be PolyWogg 4.0. At best, I was PolyWogg 3.0 still. Maybe, maybe 3.1 in some areas. Certainly not 4.0.

The other idea though came from an article I read in the Harvard Business Review about a guy who did this odd career coach thing where people in all stages of development do a feedback session, and the “candidates” make a presentation about themselves to a group of critics/evaluators. Then, the critics give them summary feedback, the equivalent of a tweet to rate what they said (not how they said it, but what they’ve accomplished, their “story” if you will). One guy outlined all his accomplishments, professional successes, etc., and the youngest one in the feedback group gave his feedback — “Nice start”. At first the guy was really put out by it, almost dismissive, and then he realized the truth bomb — the kid was saying, “So what are doing with it now? What’s next? Why is the story relevant?”.

For me, I don’t know the “why”. I only know the general direction at the moment. I’ve figured out the who for the journey (myself, Jacob and Andrea); the what and how are clear in the short-term (some of the key areas I want to work on); the where is Ottawa; and the when shifts (sometimes NOW, sometimes “I’ll get to it later”). But the “why”? I want to know where my story goes too. Because what I’ve done is a nice start, and I took a few more steps this year, but the destination is still out of sight.

2015 – Update on goals at mid-year

June 17 2015

One of the benefits of having a birthday in June is it makes a nice target for reviewing my goals and seeing how I am doing. Previous readers will recall that I set some really ambitious goals back in January, and by about the third week of February, my weekly monitoring and tracking was pretty much done. I do review my goals, and check in on my progress, but I haven’t been posting about it.

For blue / mind / organizing / planning goals, my two big ones for the year were to do more on astronomy (to re-kickstart my interest in and use of my telescope) and a kitchen renovation. For the astronomy, I had the problem last year with the gears (losing it to the repair shop for August and September), and I have to confess, I’ve been somewhat disappointed anyway with my progress. I bought a good beginner scope, and it comes with a Go-To mount that basically uses a computer to track the sky and auto-adjust to various locations. However, I’ve struggled with the tool. I would set it up, choose an object from the menu, and have the scope slew to it, but then I wouldn’t be able to see much. Almost like my scope wasn’t powerful enough to see it, or my eyes were too weak. I just wasn’t sure. I thought my alignment was working because when I would go to a planet, bam, there it was. But galaxies, nebulas, etc., I wasn’t having much luck. At a star party about 2 weeks ago now, I was sitting next to a guy with a similar sized scope and he was resolving lots of things. I asked for his help, and he adjusted the alignment of my scope, and bam! There was the ring nebula. The first time I’ve really seen anything that wasn’t “obvious” with the naked eye already. So it was clear it wasn’t my scope, my eyepieces, or my eyes, it was just the alignment. I couldn’t “see” the objects because the scope wasn’t pointing at them, just near them. So, after much research, chasing people, adjusting my technique, I’ve figured out a better (i.e. the proper) way to align the scope, and tried it out last night. Almost without exception, everything was close enough to aligned to see in the field of view. So, that’s fixed. Yay! I’ve also been using my Canon T5i in the scope to take a few pictures, but haven’t quite worked all that out yet. I’ll probably spend some time in the summer tweaking the setup, and then target the moon in September.

For the kitchen renovation, up until about 5 days ago, I would have said we were completely off the rails. We have a great contractor, but he has a small team, and goes from one project to the next in a more or less linear fashion. We finally got some plans and designs this week and have given him feedback. I feel much farther along than a week ago, although I won’t say I yet believe we’ll have it all wrapped up by the end of the summer. But back on track.

For various other blue commitments:

Haven’t been actively using my To-Do list or the tracker, and haven’t made up the HoneyDo list of things to get done around the house;
Scanning of photos and sorting them all has been pretty much on hold, but that didn’t surprise me much…I hoped to start in January, but really wouldn’t be surprised if it slipped to September;
Backups and ripping started off well, but has kind of slipped a bit, need to get back into now that I have the right e-setup;
I haven’t done anything on photography (other than some astro stuff), knitting, juggling, origami or a meteor shower (although might do Perseids in August); and,
For courses, I’ve found a great psych course at Carleton that I plan to do in the fall, but in the meantime, trying to put some time into an Understanding Video Games course which is quite interesting.

For the green / emotion commitments, my two big commitments were better engagement with Jacob and random acts of romance. For Jacob, the “nights with Dad” weren’t a big hit honestly. He was okay with them, but didn’t seem to have much interest in scheduling “activities” to do other than just going for dinner or doing the same thing we do on any given night. I’ve lessened the pressure, and while I hate the term quality time, I’ve focused more on being present when we do hang out playing games, etc. For the random acts of romance, I’ve been far from creative. Mostly it is has been giving flowers regularly. Need to work more on that one.

In terms of other activities, I have done a few MMMMM nights out for wings with the guys, but nothing recently. It’s hard to pick a night when multiple people can attend, so sometimes it’s just one or two. I enjoy it, but seems like a lot of work when I could just see those people without organizing an extra outing. For siblings, I haven’t done much outreach. There’s only 3 that I would target, and while I see one at wing nights, the other two are really just occasional phone calls and I haven’t done much reaching out in the last few months. More internally focused I suppose. Need to reboost that one. I’m still open to a corn roast party in August, supporting my friend on his AstroPontiac campaign (although little for me to do lately), and I have a charity hack to explore further, but that was my plan for the fall.

My epic failure for this year though was my plans for a giant project in November. I kept most of the details secret as I worked out the various issues, and it went belly up in about March/April. So here’s the skinny…There are tons of campaigns out there for various forms of cancer awareness and fundraising, but nowhere near the level of attention on prostate cancer. So, thinking that I could try and do something around it, I came up with some ideas about a) focusing on promoting digital rectal exams; b) coming up with a good slogan; c) trying to start something around a social media challenge / campaign targeting TV producers and writers to include storylines in their fall shows; and d) creating something more local for friends and families to create a video that would basically tell men to get themselves checked. More or less the same storyline that breast cancer campaigns used about self-exams, regular exams by doctors, etc. I lined up some medical friends to advise me, pulled in a couple of people who have decent marketing skills and awareness, and created a small list of targeted people to invite to join my campaign advisory board as I got into the text, wording, objectives, etc. leading to a dual launch (one for media types issuing the challenge, and one for local friends to do some videos). I felt energized about the plan. Maybe it would accomplish nothing in the end, but hey, I thought I would give it a go.

So here’s the problem. Prostate cancer is incredibly hard to reliably detect. There are basically two main tools that are available and the evidence of the health professionals are that both are mostly unreliable. PSE tests are incredibly unreliable and all the health professionals in the US and Canada who have reviewed the various studies and research came to the conclusion that PSE tests are not recommended except in limited situations — mainly because there are a lot of false positives that lead to unnecessary surgeries and risks, and the actual estimation is that a bad PSE will end up killing about 2/1000 people while a good PSE only saves 1/1000. So you kill two to save one. Easy no brainer to not recommend that. But I had wrongly assumed that digital rectal exams were also a no brainer. Apparently not. Their reliability and efficacy is much lower than expected, and equally not solid enough to base a campaign around. Which would leave me to do a campaign about either funding research (not what I was interested in) or raising awareness with no action to take (know your risks! and do nothing!). I had a campaign area, with no viable recommendation. Don’t get me wrong, lots of organizations out there still say do the PSE or the DRE, etc. But most of them seem to do so without any ethical check on what they are actually saying, and never present the downside. That’s not something I was interested in doing. If the evidence wasn’t there, I wasn’t going to (a) promote it and (b) even if I did promote it, it would never sell to the media types I was targeting.

In the end, I killed the campaign. It just wasn’t gelling for me fast enough to meet some early deadlines to target the writers for the challenges. Maybe I’ll try again next year, maybe I’ll do something different. Either way, I had to pull the plug for this year.

For the red / physical / directional commitments, most of it was around being more active. That took a large backseat to some other stuff in the last four months, although I’ve tried to maintain my back exercises and yoga stretches. I haven’t figured out a good walking routine yet for my schedule, but hoping to fix that next week, and I have some other ideas of small changes to get me going. I have not yet found a new dentist or doctor, although I did do my sleep test without amazing revelations. I’m likely to ditch the rappelling and zipline stuff this year, just don’t see it fitting into the schedule anytime between now and the end of the year, but I’ll keep the polar plunge option. And I’m going to start working on my French refresh in July. Overall, very little progress though.

For the yellow/creative commitments, the giant overarching commitment was to write 500,000 words this year. Unfortunately, a good portion of that was going to be around the campaign, and I was hoping for 200-250K words from that. However, I have been actively blogging on development, video games, and more importantly, the story of Becoming Jacob’s Dad. Which has allowed me to generate about 125,000 words so far this year. It puts me on track for 250K for the year still, maybe more, we’ll have to see. I’m tweeting reviews of TV episodes, closing in on 800 tweets so far this year, and expect to break 2000 by the end of the year. I don’t have a lot of followers yet, but picking up a few here and there. I haven’t completely figured out good options for TV/movie/book reviews but will have that outlined in about six weeks. A bunch of the categories will push to the fall though, as expected. On the Creativity Challenge, I did it again in February, but the take-up was quite low, and while it isn’t a lot of work, I don’t want to be chasing people either to do it. I’ve got a couple of creativity projects on the go right now including some shelving for the garage and basement, and soon a couple of cases for telescope equipment. I’m hoping to re-kickstart the HR guide this summer and finish the first draft by the end of August.

I’m happy with some things in the list above. The 125,000-word count. Blogging about Jacob. Some astronomy progress. My initial coursework. And the various tweets and memes that I have written and created. I have almost zero take up on some of it, but I’ll keep doing it for me, even if no one else cares about it.

Ways to improve yourself

June 16 2015

I read a lot of posts, blogs, articles, newspapers, journals, websites in general about goal-setting, progress, time management, self-improvement, tracking, etc. I’ve seen the literally thousands of pages set up like “lists” — “Seven ways to manage your life”, etc. — and rarely do I find them truly useful. Or even worth sharing. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s usually about 90% chaff, and 10% wheat. Or a very rare diamond in the rough.

So when I saw a post last week entitled “42 practical ways to improve yourself” over on LifeHack.Org, I was of course drawn to it but with little expectation that I would find it that great. Instead, I was almost gob-smacked — whoever curated the list (Celestine Chua is the name on the entry, but sometimes they’re curated in groups for LifeHack) did an absolutely fantastic job. Here are my favorites on the list:

Life handbook (LH #10) / Set big goals (LH #17) / Acknowledge your flaws (LH #18) / Blog or Journal (LH #26 & 27) / Let go of the past (LH #36) / Commit to your personal goals (LH #42): For me, seven of the items on the long list are really part and parcel of my approach to self-improvement quest for this year, and they can be broken down into three pieces:
1. Know yourself — flaws, strengths, past, future, warts and all;
2. Set goals — some big, some small, but stretch yourself; and,
3. Track it — some people write about it, others are into managing lists and progress meters, but basically it’s about tracking to see if you’re doing what you committed to doing;
Read (LH#1): It is Chua’s number one, but while she has hers as read a book every day, and mostly talking about non-fiction, I think it is equally useful to read regularly and in any form. Tomes, scrolls, articles, cereal boxes — it just keeps the mind engaged, actively interacting with the words in a way normally excluded from other more passive forms of entertainment (like TV/Movies/Music).
New hobby (LH #3): This would probably be tied for second for me with reading above. Rather than just doing regular hobbies, the new hobby says “I choose to stretch myself”. Sure, it could be something new within an existing hobby (like new style of sewing, new genres, etc.) but it isn’t a “full” stretch in those cases. I also think too that even when you try them, it’s important to stick with it long enough to feel like you gave it a GOOD try, not just whatever tickled your fancy for a week. Maybe you won’t be proficient, but lots of times you don’t enjoy something simply because you’re not good at it — it’s not really a fair test if you don’t give yourself a true chance to achieve some basic mastery before you decide if it is enjoyable;
Courses (LH #4): For myself, this is a great option, particularly online ones that let me schedule at will (with pros and cons of that of course). But courses are not everyone’s best learning method, particularly if the area they want to learn is more of an active hobby where they learn by doing;

Other ideas that are intriguing to me from the list: creating an inspirational room; overcoming a fear or getting out of comfort zone; writing a letter to your future self; getting a mentor or coach; do a 30-day challenge; and avoiding negative people. There are another 30 or so on the list which is great.

Overall, a great list, nicely curated. So I’m sharing it. 🙂

A newbie’s guide to the RASC Observer’s Handbook 2015

March 9 2015

I’m relatively new to astronomy, have been involved for just over 18 months, and am still pretty limited in my knowledge. One of my learning resources is being a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), Ottawa Chapter, and by being a member, I get the annual Observer’s Handbook.

The Handbook is a great resource. But I confess that as a newbie, it can be quite daunting. For example, page 23 of the 2015 handbook has a table entitled, “Heliocentric Osculating Orbital Elements for 2015: Referred to the Mean Ecliptic and Equinox of J2000.0”. Umm, sure. I’ll get right on reading that immediately. As soon as I finish grouting the tub at a friend’s house. And this is listed in a section called “Basic data”.

If you know what that table is about, congratulations! However, this means that this blog entry is not for you. It’s for the people who have the handbook and want to be able to use it without an advanced degree in astrophysics or spending 3 hours with a dictionary and going down internet wormholes looking things up on websites.

Getting Started

One might think that the Handbook would start with an overview of telescope options, but it doesn’t. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of places on the Internet that will cover the various options, and there are just too many to include every year in the Handbook. It does, however, note that you don’t even need a telescope if you want to just start with binoculars (page 60).

Most newbies assume that they should immediately jump to planets and deep-sky objects. In reality, you can go pretty far checking out the moon first. As such, the Handbook includes a moon map (page 148) and helpful tips on lunar observing (page 158). The obvious mistake many make is to think the full moon is the best viewing option, but in actual fact, any of the other days is actually better (outside of new moon when it isn’t visible at all), because the light coming from the side will illuminate mountains and show 3D relief along the edge of dark and light. It’s a great starting point, you don’t need a powerful telescope to see stuff, it’s easy to find the moon (don’t laugh! finding stuff is hard at first!), and some nights, it’s the only thing up there you can see from a bright location (like a city).

Once you’re done with the Moon, or rather, once you’re ready to expand your horizons (none of us are ever done with the moon), there are four parts to the guide that are your lifeblood as a newbie.

First and foremost, observing is mostly limited to the night time – if the sun is up, it’s too bright to see much. So, there is a list of sunrise and sunset times on page 205.

Second, there is a map of the night sky by month (page 339). If you have a planisphere, or any of a dozen astronomy programs/applications, this may be redundant, but it gives you an overview of where various things are going to be in the night sky — which gives you an idea of looking west or east, for example.

Third, there is a month-by-month guide to the sky (page 94). It is a little dense in places, but each month you can read it and have a pretty good idea of what you might consider looking for when you’re out. Maybe you’ll ignore something you’ve seen before, maybe you’ll only do one big “highlight” per month. But it is the first start in planning what you are going to see each month. It is also similar to what you’ll get in an astronomy calendar or each month from various online “guides” to what’s coming up to see.

Fourth, supplementing the month-by-month guide, there is also a guide to the planets (page 211). It gives you the basic info about the planet, but more importantly, it tells you when in the year you should plan to see it and what the likely pros/cons of different times of the year will be (i.e. when you might see it next to another planet, called a “conjunction”, when it will be high in the sky or low in the sky, etc.).

If you can master the moon (and some of its features), and then see a bunch of the planets, you’ve got the basics down pat. The best part for those two groups is that they are almost always quite bright, and thus easier to see. Sometimes you can even see the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye.

The last piece of the puzzle for newbies is being able to look at a constellation. Once you can nail one constellation, you can pretty much find the rest. Don’t worry if a constellation doesn’t look like a fish or a bear to you, it doesn’t really look like that to most people. The trick is can you find a star or two in the constellation, and from that point, figure out or spot the other stars that make up the constellation. The Handbook starts with an easy one — their feature constellation is Ursa Major (page 272).

Observing Information

Once the basics are covered, the Handbook offers a decent set of spotlights on other night targets:

An overview of deep-sky observing hints (page 85) to help you find specific stars, galaxies, or nebulae;
Seeing comets (page 265);
List of the brightest stars (page 275), including the 50 brightest by magnitude (page 285); and,
A list of double and multiple stars (page 291) which are always exciting to see (imagine looking with your naked eye at what looks like a single star, but the telescope shows you that it is actually 2 or 3 close together in the sky).

The RASC group also provides certificates to people who log their observing of a list of Messier objects, NGC, and deepsky objects (these are essentially just unique lists of objects in the sky that people or groups have indexed before and you can find all of the ones on a list and get a certificate). The certificate list is on page 308, with further links to more info about each of the sub-groups in the pages that immediately follow. I thought there was one for observing the moon too, but I don’t see it listed here.

Expanding Your Comfort Zone

There are tons of extra pages in the Handbook that might overwhelm newbies, but if you’ve done the above, you’re no longer a newbie. Nevertheless, even advanced newbies might find detailed numerical tables daunting. You can, however, consider three other “tweaks” to your observing.

I’ll start first with filters (page 64). Essentially, they are exactly what they sound like — filters to filter out certain wavelengths of light. While generally speaking you want as much light as possible to reach the telescope, using certain filters can help the planets “pop” more vibrantly. Think of it as looking at a multi-coloured object with a green filter — the green shade changes what the shadows and colours look like; if you use a red filter, different too; a blue filter, different again. And so on. So the filters can just bring out some of the contrasts, particularly for planets (with different filters working better or worse for each planet).

Many people think the only time you look at the sun is when there’s an eclipse, but if you buy a special filter (a solar filter), you can look at the sun anytime you want (page 186). You have to take basic safety precautions, no different than looking at the sun directly with your naked eye in that sense, but with the safety options in place, your “night” scope is no longer limited to just the night time. Sunspots, solar flares, all are possible sights. Some people even buy pure solar scopes, which outperform the simple “filter” option dramatically.

My last item to flag in the handbook for pushing your comfort zone is digital astrophotography (outlined on page 91). This can range from simply putting your iPhone up to the eyepiece and snapping a photo all the way to having an expensive webcam in your scope’s eyepiece while a computer records the video image the webcam can see. Numerous experienced astronomers tell newbies not to worry about photography for AT LEAST a year because it is not “simple”, it is often disappointing at the start, and it takes away from the time you need to be spending learning how to navigate the night sky an d working your telescope. By contrast, it is also a great way to feel connected to the hobby after you put your scope away.

Further Resources

I also like that the Handbook has a collection of web links to help you keep your learning going, with the handy list upfront on page 15. Some of the better ones on the list for newbies are Astronomy magazine, the Clear Sky Chart (predicts if there will be clouds or particles in the air), Heavens Above (tracking satellites, also highlighted in more detail on page 38), and the Sky and Telescope magazine site.

I hope you enjoy your Handbook and try not to let all the extra “pieces” scare you. It is for newbies as well as the technorati who have been observing for years.

2015 – Update on soul goals – Week 7

February 25 2015

Time to do a quick update, here at the end of week 7.

My soul goals, the yellow ones that are primarily about creativity this year, have been the ones I have focused on so far this year. When I was sick, they took a huge hit, but not as big as the other ones. I also started off pretty strong. But I’ve also changed my approach to them a bit, so that’s going to affect my overall word totals, even though I’m not changing my target.

I started off really strong on my big scary goal of writing 500,000 words by December 31st. In the first major week for tracking, I put together over 20K words, twice the weekly goal. It was hard, but it was also fun. Since then, not so great. I was planning on that 500K being a combination of many things:

First and foremost, my blog entries on PolyWogg.ca, and that’s still the case…while I have written 38K words on that blog, it is less than the 65K that I would have needed to write to be on track for my target.
Second, my PolyBlog site which is a bit more professional than personal, I was expecting about 500 words per week (generally one good post), and I’ve only met that twice.
Third, I’m pretty active on Twitter with writing reviews of individual TV show episodes. I had hoped for about 250 reviews by the end of the year and I’m already over 200 already. I’ll beat that goal before March is over. My goal is about 500 words per week, and I’ve beaten it every week except the first.

After those three, the change has been significant. For example, I put up anywhere from 1000 to 3000 words a week on Facebook. I also have letters, emails, research notes, etc. Probably an average of about 2000-2500 words per week. I’ve decided that rather than try to count every word, I’m going to round it all down to 1000 words a month. Equally, I have decided not to count curated items on my blogs — i.e. if I post articles where I excerpt 100 words from another site, those 100 words don’t count towards my total. Words on memes too are out, even when they are fully original as opposed to quoting someone. No words will be included from comment boards or newsgroups either. It basically comes down to four elements — my two blogs, reviews on Twitter (not even just simple tweets, only the reviews!), and then a rounded total for the big “other category”. While that other category will probably generate over 100K words in the year (or 20% of my total goal), I’ve decided it is all too difficult to track so I’m counting a very conservative 1000 words a week (which will still generate 50K for the year and 10% of my writing total).

However, that change is hurting. For four weeks in a row, I was above my cumulative total count, mainly buoyed by my large first week, but the last five have caught up with me, and I’m running behind. Twitter is going well, meme creation too.

And my reading goals are flying by. I’ve read The Monogram Murders (Agatha Christie-style with Hercule Poirot), a James Patterson novel, John D. MacDonald, an actual Agatha Christie, and A Game of Thrones. For the classics, I’ve started on Crime and Punishment, but I’m not really enjoying it and it is REALLY slow going.

Overall, I’d rate my progress as a nice yellow, maybe even a little green.

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Tag Archives: 2015

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2015 – Update on soul goals – Week 7