Getting ready to pack for Night Fall in Borrego Springs, CA. I'm giving two workshops on using TheSkyX and a morning (morning?!?! What ARE they thinking… it's a STAR PARTY!) talk on our move back to the Mac and iStuff plans. I've always dreamt of spending the night in the desert, and not in a 55 gallon drum… anyway, I'm really looking forward to this.

In the mean-time, Gas Giants, our first iPhone app has been submitted to the App store and we are waiting for Apples blessing. I expect we'll make some noise as soon as it's available. I'm also hard at work on our next iPhone/iPad app, and actually I'm stopping on the way back from Night Fall in Golden do do some planning and such with Steve and the brothers Bisque. Staying at Tom's house with his cats<g>. Learning from him sometimes is like drinking from a firehouse, but he's got a nice setup and he just makes TPoint look so easy ;-)

In my other travels, I recently attended the US Science and Engineering Festival in Washington DC. I was helping out in the PARI (www.pari.edu) booth, and never in my life have I seen such a mass of humanity. There were reportedly over a million people there. It was geek heaven, and we had thousands of people at our booth. My one regret... I never made it down to the NCIS booth to get my picture made with Abby. Maybe next year... Anyway, reports of the death of interest in science and engineering appear to be somewhat exaggerated. There were plenty of interested and very bright young future customer... um... minds there. I swear, I taught a 5 year old to do spectral stellar classification on a computer. She couldn't even read, but she could match patterns!

So, one other thing to crow about. I finally have my own Paramount! Well, it's not "mine", but it's mine in same way "your" desk at work is "your" desk and "your" computer, etc. One weekend with it in my back yard and I'm indentured forever. Now I can never quit. I've played with them before, but never just had one with my own scope doing my own thing. It's similar to when I won an expensive Nagler eyepiece at the Winter Star Party, all my other eyepieces were instantly turned to trash. Now all my other mounts are plastic battery operated toys. After setting it up, I spent some time wiping it down with a cloth getting all the styrofoam bits off of it, and I realized this was the uber-geeks equivalent of waxing my Ferrari. My wife came out, inspected the thing, and asked it if came in blue. I'm sure going to miss her.

Richard