Today I was teaching some Astrophysics to my SL class. I made a binary star with interactive physics and they thought it was out of this world (haha). I am always amazed by how much we know from such little information, take the Cepheid variable for example. Watching documentaries on TV you might get the impression that these are quite impressive flashing lights in the heavens rather like the flashing Christmas tree lights that my wife bought by mistake this Christmas. The reality is rather less impressive as can be seen on the video from the Hubble site. Focusing in on that tiny dot for several days and you see some sort of variation in brightness. I read in the paper that there are plans to build bigger and bigger telescopes its just a pity that they have run out of imaginative names, two of the new ones will be called; TMT- thirty meter telescope and ELT- extremely large telescope, do they lack imagination or are they being ironic?
I've got a VSBT - very small broken telescope.