I'm sure that I'll be writing plenty about New Horizons and what we find at Pluto, but this is more about Neptune.
Yes, Neptune, which was the last stop of the outer solar system of Voyager two's tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which saw those planets visited for the first time (or second in the cases of Jupiter and Saturn) and saw dazzling pictures of detail never before seen-just like we will see from Pluto.
Neptune's debutante ball was in 1989 and in a different television world than today.
Yes, we were in the cable age and there were plenty of channels compared to 1979, but the numbers paled compared to 26 years later.
There was no NASA channel to cover Voyager like you have today, but there was our standard for learning in good ol' PBS, which showed a basic broadcast of data coming in called "Neptune-up all night".
Nothing elaborate, but covering something no one else was, which even today is often the case with PBS, grabbing a niche' that no one else is using and being satisfied with a group of people that want a little more from their television than just entertainment.
The data would come in chunks and you would see the screen fill in pieces as they came in and were then sifted through the produce a picture through what Voyager had to offer, which was 1970s technology in its purest form (Voyager 2 took 12 years to reach Neptune) and needed refinement before you could really understand what you were seeing.
The discovery of the "Great Dark Spot" and the richness of the methane coloring of Neptune (Uranus was far visually duller) led to a beautiful finished product, but the picture that you see above from Voyager was not what you were seeing on PBS, which was essentially black and white with a few specks of color around the edges of the screen.
Most of the really interesting discoveries about Neptune would come much later when there was more time to determine what the data told them, but what I remember about that night was even less about the first trip to a new planet than that I shared it with my son.
I stayed up late even then and even though I knew that Ryan wouldn't be able to process what he was watching, I propped him beside me on the couch and shared the experience with him.
It was more for me than for him as he was likely to never remember it, but I remember it like so many people had their young children in front of the TV when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.
It just was a young father sharing a night with his son and I remember just holding Ryan in my arms after he dozed off with his night finished, as the night rolled on.
It wasn't about what I learned or about what Ryan learned, it was about developing bonds and making connections, not really about Neptune.
Tomorrow night, New Horizons will fly by Pluto in our last visit to an unknown planet for quite a long time and I'll be watching from the road office on NASA Tv or maybe on the internet.
I'm a different person than I was then, older, heavier, and hopefully wiser.
The little boy that I held in my arms is now a man that is seven years older than I was on that day that I am quite proud of, but it's more than just pride.
It's about looking back at a time that I didn't have much, but I had a great wife and put lots of energy into hopefully making my son a good person.
Somehow, I think I'll be reflecting more on Neptune and the memories of a night long ago than that night flying by Pluto with a smile on my face.
The plan is for some more Pluto talk on the night New Horizons flies by...
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