The tale of a cataract as told by an astrophotographer
Sight, in humans, is quite a popular thing. People regard it highly, and do seem to think it's an overall good idea. My experience of sight has been, like most other people, a given. It started great, and as a kid my family would occasionally use me to find things, like shop signs, in the distance. Of course, it does deteriorate over time, and I've worn glasses since early university. It started just for reading, but soon I was wearing them full-time. It turned out that apart from being long-sighted, I had astigmatisms which were reasonably severe, and getting worse. You get old Eventually I wasn't able to look through telescopes any longer: unless I had an eyepiece that I couldn't afford, the eye relief - the required distance between the eyepiece and your eyeball - was so short that I had to remove my glasses. Without glasses, of course, all I could see were comets. No, they weren't meant to be there. Resignedly, I gave up visual astronomy and went deeper into