There’s a lot of things I’d like to do I’m pretty sure I’ll never get around to, like sail a boat across an ocean, or live a year by the sea in a little shack on a lonesome beach. More realistically, I’ve always wanted to know how to ride a horse, or a motorcycle. And it really would be super driving a good GT machine around the North Loop of the Nurburgring.

But the one that really has been on my mind lately is to see the southern sky. Just a vacation won’t do, I would like to stay for an entire year, an entire four seasons, particularly at a dark sky site, like the Chilean desert or the Australian outback.

I want to see the familiar constellations of my southern horizon turned upside down, and I want to learn the odd shapes and strange names of the new ones rising on my left hand as I face the pole. I want to take in the Southern Cross straddling the Coal Sack, and Alpha Centauri, so near yet so far away.

I want to gaze with my naked eye at 47 Tucanae and Omega Centauri. I want to see the Magellanic Clouds dancing about the celestial pole, and the Sagittarius Milky Way, the galactic center, blazing fiercely overhead.

A rich-field telescope would be nice, or even a good pair of binoculars. But that would not even be necessary. There is an entire half of the universe I have never seen with the unaided eye.