No, wait for it. You can go to a local astronomy club’s open house or star party, often for free. You can look through their scopes, and don’t even have to find stuff yourself. All you really have to do is go outside at night and look. From a dark sky site, the Milky Way is gorgeous. And you don’t need anything more complicated than a blanket to watch meteors (the Perseid Meteor shower peaks tonight).

I bought a ten inch scope that has a computer to help find stuff for $700. I’m pretty much done buying stuff.

But if you really want to pour money down a rat hole, you could combine photography with astronomy. Astrophotography is, uhm, astronomically expensive. But you can get really good pictures if you spend $9000. And have a big vehicle to haul your stuff around. And have at least 3 hours of patience to meticulously set up your stuff each time. And you have others who’ve spent $20,000 or more to find out what works and what doesn’t at hand so you can optimize your expenses.

But for my money, the HST pictures on line are cheaper and better.

A pair of binoculars will get you into bird watching. Mine were $25.

Delightfully middle-class? Me? Well I never!

I do enjoy those kind of books, actually. We have a relatively large collection of books from the early 1800s-onwards at my Grandmother’s house which have been handed down through the generations – I think there’s a first edition Dickens in the collection, alongside other books…

Jokes

Know what you mean about the books. Though I quite enjoy looking at old books, the kind with leather hard back covers and thick yellowed pages.