Everyone had a BLAST on Yuri's night. I can hardly move my neck from all the head banging and we are all sore from dancing in general. In addition to rocking out, we had the techno and glowsticks dance time and a bit of gangsta rapping (please refer to pictures to observe our hardcoreness). Yes, Chip was dressed like that the entire evening. I must say that the Commander (who is the age of my dad) surprised us all by tearing it up like a rock star! All in all, it was an impressively loud and rowdy party for six sober people in Utah. The dancing and yelling and laughing were an excellent release and bonding experience, and what better excuse than on a night dedicated to celebrating human space exploration?

Today, we woke up pretty late and moped around for a while. Chip designated cleaning and shut down tasks that have to be completed by tomorrow night. Everyone is more or less on their own schedule for completing these, but we still take our meals together. At these meals we take special care not to let PJ slice the bread. He has a death grip with his holding hand and pushes rather than slices with the knife. All loafs formerly known as bread end up as compact breadwad in his enormous Belgian hands.

I myself was pretty unproductive all day. When night fell, however, I threw the dinner in the oven and went to the observatory. The night I was waiting for finally arrived! Not windy, perfectly clear, not bitterly cold. I geared it up and Marcus and I checked out Saturn and a lovely array of clusters and nebulae before heading back for dinner. After dinner, I headed back out with Irene, PJ, and Alex. I had to drag Alex out since he never came out the first night and at least needed to see something through the telescope. The man lives in LA for Heaven's sake, and can probably count the number of stars (but not the celebrity kind) he's seen in the last year on one hand. Irene and PJ soon left, which was good as the dome is quite small and PJ always manages to take up a sizeable percentage of the room. Alex and I took up entirely more time than we meant to looking at all sorts of things.

The highlight was definitely Saturn, and was similar to Chip's first experience last week. I found the little guy and centered it in the scope, then moved aside and let him look. "What am I looking at? Is that supposed to be Saturn?" "What do you THINK it is? How many things in the sky are there with rings? You can't miss it, Alex." "Okay, okay. I can't - OH. MY. GOD. Oh my God!! Ohmygod. That is the COOLEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN" and so forth. Everyone needs to appreciate the real night sky at least once in their lives, and look through a telescope at Saturn. We have become so removed from the celestial rhythms and familiarities that defined our ancestor's lives that less than 1% of the American population can tell you the approximate phase of the moon at any given time. But lectures aside, we continued viewing until about 1:30 am. I'm scrolling out of the menus when I notice that Jupiter and Pluto have suddenly popped up, so naturally we decide to check them out.

Jupiter was incredible; we could see the bands and all four Galilean moons were on the same side. Comparing their relative distance to Jupiter (max of about 10 Jupiter radii) to the distance between Titan and Saturn (spanning the entire field of view, at least 50 Saturn radii) is an exercise in celestial distances than can only be taught by seeing it for oneself. Finally, we checked out Pluto. Not nearly as impressive as Saturn and Jupiter, but incredible nonetheless because of the sheer distance and the presence of Charon (its moon). During this time I mentioned that my reports weren't done yet and Alex (second in command) dutifully suggested that I complete them ASAP. So we shutdown the dome and went inside. What a night!