You're welcome! I happened to have just come back in from gazing a bit. I highly recommend binoculars as an introductory to optics because they're very portable, very easy to set up, and offer a brighter view for the money than a telescope. The tradeoff is much less magnification.

7x35, 8x42, and 10x50 are the recommended sizes for handheld viewing. If you end up getting a tripod and adapter (the hinge on any of these first 3 will have a threaded receiver too), 16x70s, 20x80s, or similar ones marketed as astro binos are feasible. Leave the 10x25s and 20x50s home for daytime use.

The important thing is the implied 3rd number form those specs. The first number is the magnification, the second number is the outer lens diameter in mm. If you divide the outer lens by the mag, you get the eye-side lens diameter. 35/7=5mm, 42/8=5.25, 50/10=5. This is the real key to night use. Pupils dilate to a maximum of 7mm, shrinking as you age. The bigger the bino aperture, the better use of your pupil aperture. 5mm is where the cost/benefit lines up best in the market, so that's why those first three are the recommended specs. Meanwhile, the cheap and common 10x25s and 20x50s have just 2.5mm apertures, closer to your daylight pupil size. They'll be dim. The 16x70s and 20x80s are 4.3 and 4.0mm respectively, so you started losing brightness to cost there as you approach having two telescopes bolted together, but using two eyes is still advantageous.

I'm rusty on the popular model lines, but I was choosing between Nikon Acculon and Nikon Action Extreme years back. Nikon is one of the best lens manufacturers. Binoculars use a prism inside to flip the image right side up and that glass is even more important than the lens, and these two models excel there, too. I paid more for the AE because it has better durability and water resistance. I'm reasonably careful, but I don't take precautions with mine. I'm often stargazing on a sandy beach somewhere as bodies of water mean no light pollution in that direction. Sand, humidity, salt spray, temperature swings, my AEs don't care. They've been on many plane rides in both my backpack and my suitcase.

But whatever 5mm aperture binos you can find will open up the sky for you. For size, I've tried both the 7x35 and 10x50 AEs (so equivalent comparison). I prefer the 10s for notably more zoom, although it's harder to hold steady. They're ~50% larger and heavier though. When scouting around for objects like those on the Messier catalogue, they're all going to be small blobs, so the 40% better mag is worth to me. But either way, the number of stars seen with that brightening effect is magnificent. The 7s let you detect more of our galactic structure though when looking into the Milky Way band. But for that, I built Nikon 2x56s with a 3d printed shell and obsolete ~2003 Nikon 2x camera multipliers from an obsolete 4mp camera model.

I'm northern hemisphere. Andromeda galaxy, Leo cluster, and lagoon nebula are easy targets in the summer. Orion nebula, beehive open cluster, in the winter and I think perseus open cluster. Helix nebula is probably the most defined thing I can spot if the skies are dark (bortle 4 max) in the summer, as an obvious gray disk.

Gonna touch on light real quick. Lightpollutionmap.info is my go-to site. Bortle scale is 1-9. Higher is worse. Class 2/3 is worth my time. That's the blue regions. I'll go further for gray class 1/2. Getting to no-color 1 is usually difficult.

Night adaptation. Your pupils dilate in seconds, but your eyes are also doped with "rhodopsin". It takes 20 minutes for rhodopsin to to fully re-dope your receptors for night vision. This is why indoors seems so dark for a fee minutes when entering and why going outdoors seems so bright for a few minutes. But for this level of dark adaptation, assume you need the full 20 mins. Red light will not affect it, but blue/purple/UV will, which is part of what makes lights and screens white. Phone screen, flashlights, headlights, white street lights will affect it. Avoid all that. Phones with reddish screen settings called various things like low-blue, night shade, f.lux, etc do help. You'll probably want a phone app to help locate things. SkySafari is my preference

Astronomy because it makes me feel funny. Or simply stargazing. I don't see a need to differentiate because the vibe changes every time I go out specifically for this.

There's a convenience. It's something that I can dabble in just by stepping outside at night, it's something I can work into a trip if there's a significantly darker sky within an hour of my itinerary, it's something I can plan a trip specifically for. As a night owl, it's also something that occurs during the "bonus hours" of the day, so I can still do all the daytime entertainment activities and still get more fun time. Do I feel tired the next day? I don't want to talk about it. But I can stay out to 3am if the conditions are good. Hell, last time, I saw the darkest skies of my life yet and didn't hit bed until sunset. 100% worth it to me.

There's an overview effect. This is the primary driver of the hobby. I can't promise it matches the feeling astronauts feel seeing Earth from space, but I have to beleive that the knowledge of that feeling, the knowledge of how distant every point of light is, the feeling of knowing millions of other people are seeing an essentially identical sky right now, just gives me such a twisted feeling. I'm alone, yet we're all together on this planet, but the planet is alone. I can feel the overwhelming feeling that none of this view is tangible. I can look towards the moon, I can look towards some visible planets, I can use a telescope or binoculars to see them better. The moon has texture that feels tangible, but then I can consider the fact that every single planet in our solar system, the ones that are single-color dots by eye, would fit in the space between is and the moon. Just 400,000 km. Just the space astronauts travel in a couple days. More mass of planets than is even fathomable, more surface area, an order of magnitude or two more area than we have on Earth, fits between us and the nearest body. We're stuck here. None of the beautiful things we can spot in deep space are tangible, reachable, achievable. They're not even fathomable in size. Every nebula in sight, every cluster, everything visible is far, far greater than the size of our entire solar system. Unfathomably large, intangibly far. When I'm out in truly dark skies, especially with clear horizons, it's just an insane feeling because it feels it's just a solid sky dome because it takes all the same focus. But the focus is at infinity. My eyes just can't tell a mile from a lightyear because there's nothing of context. If I'm deep in thought, one of the coolest things to me is seeing a plane fly through. Suddenly, the context clues of knowing 200 people are in the tiny structure overhead make me feel so incredibly small. The blurs and blubs I've been sizing up suddenly, scarily, have a tiny plane in front of it, and the scale hits me like a train. Similar things can happen with distant horizon objects and the Milky Way band.

And sometimes I take pictures.

Seconding this option. While it's not necessarily the theme here, it's one of my most active hobbyist/interest communities. I posted here once and was given some pointers and how to improve the things I called out

I was thinking if the train hit this guy, it'd be the end of that lineage

Look at the way it jets out. It jets sideways. The preview picture to this article even shows it. The only thing curving the flame upwards is convection. The instant the gas is out of the jet, it's depressurized

I've spent a lot of time testing and modifying my hvac and general home circulation. My main tool is a smoke pencil, basically a pushbutton vape. Air is stupidly stagnant. Suction vents have stupidly low influence over the air even within arm's length of the duct. Convection is the only thing carrying stove gasses upwards and if there's no heat because it's not lit, the methane isn't going up on its own. Just diffusing into the air with a preference for sinking. But the amount coming out is pretty low for a reasonable lighting attempt and the dangerous ignitable level is much, much higher than what that attempt will dispense. A couple flaps with a hand towel or toaster tray will disperse it plenty for good measure

That is the opposite of another comment here. I guess I'll beleive neither and refuse both tests to play it safe

The gas wouldn't have gone upwards into the vent. It's a heavy molecule for starters, but also just depressurized on release, making it colder. It'd sink down. The reason the vent is important when running is because the gas fumes are going to be significantly heated and rise via convection.

Unnecessarily reductive. It's both the ceilings and walls. There is no single solution. We also have no idea of they have an attic or vaulted ceilings. An attic full of hot air is a heat bank that will radiate into the living space all night. All insulation will do is slow the transfer. Really good attic floor insulation will help retain heat in the attic, so you still want to improve attic ventilation. But, if you reduce the amount of heat going into the attic in the first place, you reduce how much insulation and ventilation you need to reach a certain cost/benefit ratio. It's usually more feasible to do half a job addressing each than it is to make just one variable perfect. So, when it comes to replacing a roof covering that needs replacing anyway, doesn't it make sense to do that as best as feasible?

Tour a home with an infrared thermometer camera in summer. I promise you, the ceiling is warm, too. You just don't hang out 3 meters up.

Yes, but it is sourced very far away and gets refined into a different product for consumer use that is always available (except during a local crisis) so therefore it's not something to worry about and is naturally occurring.

Short-sighted concerns.

Your bro is just a prank, bro

Eeeexcellent, I'm excited for you.

[couple edits] One time, I pulled the front brake to see what would happen on ice. What happens is you suddenly learn that steering the front wheel is the only thing that keeps a bicycle balanced. Once it skids, you have no steer, and whatever tilting momentum you had at the time is now permanent. Sliding on the ice was actually quite nice [compared to grinding into pavement].

I didn't really understand it at the time, but it set the groundwork for a future understanding when I got into motorcycling. Having the front wash out and tipping into a "low side" crash is much more common on motorcycles, as it's much easier to get to the limits of grip. Same deal with balancing: you're constantly doing minor movements of the [bars] to keep you upright. It's not the gyroscopic effect, it's not your body moving; you're steering with tiny corrections on a mechanism with geometry that makes it work intuitively and with self-correcting steering.

Every time you want to go left, whether you know it or not, you start with a little motion of pushing the bars right. Even if you ride with no hands on the bars, your body shifts to force the bars the opposite way first. The bars and wheel go right, the tires roll to the right, the bike and body fall left, your arms and/or the geometry pull the wheel and bars left. Bam, you're now leaning and steering left while still in balance.

Every bicycle and motorcycle works like this. What makes it a skill worth honing is that once you decouple the "countersteer" motion from the entire turning process, it allows you to have much, much better control over the machine. In motorcycles, it's really valuable to be able to command more or less lean when you misjudge a turn. Something I try to explain to every new rider because bicycles and motorcycles just make it intuitive with the steering geometry, but motorcycles have much larger consequences without any real escalation in required skill beyond general road testing.