With the comet Pan-STARRS hanging out in the night sky recently, Anna and I decided to head down to the Franklin Institute for one of their evening observatory sessions, hoping we could take a look at the comet. It turned out to be too low on the horizon to see from the observatory, but that didn’t stop us from having a marvelous time.

The big telescope at the Institute is an impressive thing:

It also enjoys a lovely view of some earthly sights, namely the Philly skyline:

The weather was crisp and cold that night – and we had left our coats in the car down in the parking garage! But the view of the telescope, which was trained on Jupiter and its moons that night, was worth the chilly wait.

Tomorrow: The Giant Heart.

I mentioned yesterday that Anna made herself a lovely Colonial dress as part of a Girl Scouts project. Here are all of the girls from her group in their self-made dresses at their Court of Awards ceremony last week:

What a fantastic group of kids!

Our crafty girls are at it again… Chelsea led a Girl Scout dressmaking project with Anna’s group. Anna decided to make herself a Colonial dress. The results speak for themselves:

Chelsea helped with the project, of course, but Anna did quite a lot on her own. It was an impressive effort. Can’t wait to see what she is making ten years from now!

…but we knew this already, didn’t we?

Look closely for Nick in this picture:

The weather outside remains frightful – by March standards – but the Sperger kids are still delightful.

For our Friday update, a couple of looks at my darling Chelsea, who is an enthusiastic rock climber. We were joined at the rock gym by Chelsea’s good friend Andy and her daughters. This was a nice picture of the two of them together:

Here she is in mid-scramble around the bouldering area of the gym:

And this one is blurry but you get the idea – after a big climb up one of the main walls, Chelsea took a funny-looking rest on the floor:

Happy weekend, everybody!

A few weeks back, we had a day off work and school. Nick had other plans, but the rest of us trooped off to the Doylestown Rock Gym to get climbing.

More to come in the next couple days!

I do a fair amount of traveling for work – not as much as some people I work with, but enough to require me to get extra pages in my passport. I had a big trip in January that took me to Germany, followed by Las Vegas. You can imagine the contrast between the two places was… striking.

I wanted to share this picture that I snapped on final approach to Las Vegas. I loved how the last rays of sunlight were just peeking over the mountains, while the city as already lit up for nighttime.

They use a heck of a lot of electricity in Vegas, that’s for sure.

We’re spending a lot of time in New York City these days. A couple weekends ago, it was Miss Maria doing an audition for a summer ballet program in the Big Apple:

You can see in the picture that they got quite a lot more snow than we did that weekend… this was back on February 8th, when we got barely an inch (2.5cm). New York, on the other hand, got 10+ inches (25+ cm) of wintry wonderland.

We got a dispatch from my Dad this weekend… before Maria’s ballet performance, he was down at the Liacouras Center watching Temple play a nail-biter against Rhode Island. I got a kick out of this picture because Dad’s sporting a Temple logo on his cheek. Team spirit!

Dad reports it was an up-and-down battle, with Temple prevailing in the end.