It's strange what will set people off. I got to spend a day in the metropolitan museum of art. The four thousand year old woven cloth pretty much brought me to tears.

Astronomy never held a deep fascination for me, but i can relate to seeing a technology that both has deep personal meaning and changes the way culture interacts with science.

Good for him.

Nice, but not useful. Google Earth is useful, so it will remain more popular than Telescope by an order of magnitude. Unless aliens land or humans settle on other planets, that is.