be excited about 2009

2009 is the UN-declared international year of astronomy. this marks the 400th anniversary of the first time a telescope was used to look upward into the skies instead of outward across the lands. galileo used his refracting telescope to look at the details of the craters on the moon and discover that jupiter had moons of its own... demonstrating that it was possible for an object, other than the earth, to be the center of *something*!!


this also adds to the long list of reasons why i'm excited to move to the UK... i'll be close enough to venture to the places where astronomy as a science was first practiced... during their celebrations of the international year of astronomy!