Anyone here into astronomy? Ya know, setting up a telescope and star-gazing?

Yeah, a bit. It's surprising how even a little 3-inch refractor can let you see Saturn's rings, Jupiter's cloud bands, and... when Mars was at its closest recently, I was barely able to make out an ice cap. Barely.

What I find most interesting about viewing things with an optical telescope is how it turns the distant planets into solid-looking objects instead of indistinct points of light. It gives you a real sense of place and position that you can't get from viewing photographs or images on a computer monitor.

I've got a friend who works on the computer imaging from some of those Mars missions, and he says he's never thought of Mars as something "distant". To him, it's always been a tangible place where you could walk around and take pictures, as much as the Grand Canyon or New York is to everyone else. I didn't get that sense until after I'd seen the planets with my own eye (through a set of lenses).