Big plans with Celestron!

Well, I can tell you that Astronomy’s new advertising manager, Jamie Rinehart, and I have had a marvelous brief trip to Los Angeles. On Tuesday we flew from Milwaukee to Denver, then Denver to Denver, and then Denver to LAX. Yes, you read that right: our Denver to LA flight was diverted after an hour in the air due to what the crew called “inappropriate baggage,” so we turned around and landed in Denver again. After 20 minutes on the ground, we took off from Denver for a second time. It was a strange experience.

Yesterday, we extended our foray to telescope industry partners by visiting Celestron, the world’s foremost manufacturer of telescopes. I can tell you that I’m excited by visiting old friends at Celestron for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that my first telescope was a Celestron — a classic 1976 C8 that I still have and use.

And great friends and associates are here — Michelle Meskill, Kevin Kawai, Dave Anderson . . . the list goes on and on.

We have a great variety of partnership projects going on with Celestron, and this will be a banner year for events and products you will see in print, online, and in person. Two notable events we will strongly partner with Celestron on will be the National Science Teachers Association meeting in Chicago in March and the World Science Festival in New York in May. And there will be others too.

And there are LOTS of other initiatives I am excited to tell you about, but in good time!

For now, Jamie and I will take a brief glance at Los Angeles today and expect our flights to go from LAX to Denver and back to Milwaukee.

But you never know.