The End of Novelty

I have five telescopes. Four are astrographs – two Ritchey-Chretien (RC) reflectors and two APO refractors. The fifth is a fast Newtonian that last saw service during the 1985 visit of Halley’s comet. The larger of the two refractors has a permanent home in our backyard observatory. The other is my travel scope – an 80mm f/5 APO. The same is true of the RCs – the larger one is meant for observatory work, and the smaller 6″ RC accompanies us to dark sites. I’ve had these scopes for years, and all of them have gotten enough use that there is nothing novel about them. Or that’s what I thought.

The telescope mount in the backyard observatory is the big brother of the mount that I take on astrophotography trips. We haven’t been on an astronomy trip for over a year, and I have forgotten some of the subtle but crucial differences between my travel set-up and its bigger brother. Last night, I assembled the travel scope and mount in the living room for a dry run, as it were. Nothing worked! My laptop and the mount refused to talk to one another. Merde!

I updated the control software on the laptop. No joy. I tried to update the software on the mount. Still no success. I got frustrated and went to bed. This morning, I tried again. This time I downloaded the guide documents that explain how to update the mount’s software. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t connecting to the mount through the correct port. After a few minutes of tinkering, I had updated the mount software. Eureka!

I still couldn’t get the laptop and mount to play well together. I downloaded another document that explained how the mount and computer are meant to be connected. I was using the wrong cable! Once I resolved that issue the computer and mount cooperated flawlessly.

I describe this pedestrian bit of astronomy gear frustration to observe that even when we become very familiar with some tool or device, we can forget how to use it properly after an absence of sufficient duration for memory to fade. What was at last familiar once again becomes novel. At least it wasn’t something dangerous like a chain saw!

This reminded me of what I have been reading about SARS-CoV-2 of late. When it first burst on the scene, we referred to the virus it as a novel Coronavirus. It was novel because it had not previously circulated among humans. Few if any of those who became infected had any immunity to it (sometimes pathogens cause cross-immunity to a similar but different pathogen – exactly what happens when a cowpox infection gives one immunity to smallpox). That wasn’t the case with COVID. And this virus keeps producing new variants; Omicron variants BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 now account for ~40% of the COVID infections in the US. They are elbowing out BA.5.

While the new Omicron variants are different from their predecessors, they are no longer really novel. Enough of us have been vaccinated for other strains of SARS-CoV-2 or infected by them that we are no longer COVID virgins. Because of this, many COVID infections tend to be milder than they were when it was truly a novel virus. I suppose that at some point, our collective immunity to the familiar will wane, just as my memory of how to link mount and laptop did, and COVID will again behave as if it is novel.

I hate it when that happens.