1 phone picture

National Naval Observatory:

The public was invited to come to the Observatory for a rare peek at what goes on there, so Jill and the kids and I went. There were lots of amateur telescopes on the lawn (where Alex is parked in this photo) and Alex loved seeing the details of the moon through a variety of lenses. Then we waited in line for 20 minutes in order to see an old 26" telescope (30+ feet long!) which was very cool, though we were disappointed that we didn't get to see an image through the lens of the thing! Coolest parts were that the telescope was so big, and moved, and that the wooden floor is an elevator (so that astronomers back in the day could see out of the telescope without perching on a ladder all night.) The 26" telescope is the oldest piece of equipment in the navy that is still in service (I think that I wrote that correctly...?)

The dome in the picture below is for the 12" telescope. The line for that would have been more than an hour, and then you would get to see an image (though we were told that they weren't going to wow us much more than what we could see through the amateur lenses outside, with basically no wait.)