IDA Darksky Giveaway is on!

If you are not yet familiar with the International Dark-sky Association ( IDA ) now is a great time to become aquatinted with them and sign up as a member.  The IDA's mission is to

...preserve and protect the nighttime environment and our heritage of dark skies through environmentally responsible outdoor lighting. 

Now is a particularly good time to join because any member can enter to with a full set of Teleview Ethos eyepieces via their Darksky Giveaway.  I'm not sure how many members there are, and how many will register online for the contest, but it's a fantastic prize and my odds are probably not too bad! Seeing the announcement in my email box made me think of how I finally decided to join.

Almost since the time I began my most recent foray into amateur astronomy several years ago I knew about the IDA and it's goals.  It does not take more than a few seconds to read their mission statement as it's direct and to the point.  I hated light pollution, but never really thought about donating, until last year at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show ( PATS ).

PATS is a relatively small show, and it does not take more than a few hours to walk the floor and see most of the booths.  I had walked past a the IDA booth a few times when I finally stopped to take a look at some of their literature.  As I was reading one of the pamphlets, I asked the nice guy behind the booth how the day had been so far.  He was upbeat, but said he had not had many people signup for memberships so far.  I kept reading, expecting this to be the end of things, but he said something that made me stop and listen; "I've watched people spend hundreds of dollars on an eyepiece, but they won't spend $50 to help preserve the sky they look at through them".

I knew eyepieces were an investment that would last me a long time, regardless of the telescopes I ended up.  Just that day I purchased a filter and a new 32mm Teleview plossl.  I thought about a time ten or twenty years from now when I would have to travel even further, perhaps prohibitively  far, just to use them.  It was a scary thought, and the investment in preserving the dark sky suddenly seemed like a very sound one.

So now might be a great time to consider if an investment in the future of dark sky observing is right for you... and a set of Ethos' would be pretty cool!