My friend Robin kind of amazed me the other day. He sat down next to me on the bus to work, a pile of astronomy magazines in his lap. He told me how the night before he noticed this weird new smudgey star in the sky where there never used to be one. None of his star charts, including the most current for November, showed anything in that region of space. It was kind of a mystery. Of course now Comet Holmes is all over the news for its anomalous brightness- it cracked or blew up or something so it went a million times brighter than it should've been. Which is why Robin was able to pick it out of the sky with the naked eye. The amazing thing to me is that he was able to recognize one star as being out of the ordinary.
So last night we took advantage of the perfectly clear sky to inspect Holmes, and admire Mars which is beautifully bright this month. One advantage of nightshift.
Anyways, Robin would like to enlist your help with something. He wants a telescope. Really really badly. More badly than you do. So here's what you can do- first, go to Astronomy Magazine and enter their win-a-telescope contest. Secondly, win a telescope. Third, give it to Robin. Okay? Okay.