Bill Pellerin
Houston Astronomical Society
www.astronomyhouston.org
GuideStar Editor

Good Enough

There’s a scene in the book Huckleberry Finn in which Huck and Jim are considering boarding a wrecked boat to see if there’s anything of value to be retrieved. Jim doesn’t think it’s such a good idea and says that the pair is doing “blame well and we better leave blame well alone…”.

An observing friend of mine quoted that passage to me while considering improvements he could make to his astro-imaging setup. His setup was producing very good images and any changes might make it incrementally better but instead he wanted to concentrate on executing his imaging program with the equipment he had. Everything was working ‘blame well’ good enough for his purposes.

A more contemporary writer, Paul Simon, wrote a song that says “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it’s true”. All of us think about how we could improve our observing equipment – larger telescope, better mount, better camera, better eyepieces, etc. Sometimes, though, we just chasing the train in the distance when leaving your equipment inventory ‘blame well alone’ is the right thing to do.

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