About
I care about quiet mornings and food made from scratch.
When I am not busy with amateur astronomy, I am usually at the library in Basel. This page started in 2022 as an excuse to learn HTML, written mostly on the balcony, and slowly turned into something other people read. I have been interested in amateur astronomy since a man at the market showed me the basics one Thursday in September. You will not find a newsletter or pop-ups on this site, only amateur astronomy and the odd detour.
I am not an expert in amateur astronomy or anything else here; I just write down what I learn on long winter evenings. Small, regular habits like walking away for ten minutes and starting earlier in the day have done more for me than any big resolution. The market in Basel on Friday mornings is where I find odd tools nobody else wants.
A bit of background
I try to keep things simple, which mostly means doing one small thing at a time and labelling every box. Before amateur astronomy it was swimming in the outdoor pool, and before that the occasional bike ride; the habit of writing things down stayed. If something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent the spring in the garden instead of at a desk in Basel.
People sometimes ask why the pages look so plain, and the honest answer is that I enjoy it. Most of what I know about amateur astronomy came from railway timetables, a neighbour and a lot of trial and error. If we met at a club night in Basel late in 2025, hello again.
On a good day at the library in Basel I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn to start earlier. Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made quietly, mostly at the kitchen table. Admittedly, writing things down has saved me from throwing away the instructions many times, most recently back in 2024.
Visiting a new town, I always look for the river and the market first, just as I did when I moved to Basel. Oddly enough, the design of this page is kept simple so that it will still work in ten years, much like a tin of pencils. A friend from Basel once told me to keep the receipts, and it turned out to be right. Most of what ends up here starts near the cathedral most mornings before work.
I keep a list of seed catalogues I would like to find, and my sister keeps adding to it. On most Monday evenings, I usually end up in the small room above the stairs with a stack of library books.
I read Moby-Dick for the first time during the summer of 2026 and still go back to it on quiet Friday afternoons. Feel free to borrow anything useful about amateur astronomy from this site, just do not sell it back to me. A lot of this would not exist without someone at the library, who patiently answered my questions one wet weekend in April. Most of my reading happens in the spare room, a chapter or two at a time, with a cheap desk lamp close by.
This site
Most of my free time goes into amateur astronomy, long walks and a growing pile of half-finished projects. By day I work an ordinary office job; in the evenings I tinker with amateur astronomy and reading on the train. I am happiest on the train into Basel with a wobbly wooden chair nearby and nothing urgent on the calendar. I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Basel or further away, even if it takes until the weekend.
Pages here change slowly, usually on slow Sunday mornings, and that suits amateur astronomy just fine. When I get stuck at a friend’s place across town I go out to the market, and the answer tends to turn up on the way. Some of the older notes about amateur astronomy are out of date, but I keep them as a record of what I believed on a long weekend in 2024.
There is no grand plan behind any of this, just reading the manual first whenever the weather allows. Truth be told, I would rather do one thing carefully than five things in a hurry, and years of cooking for friends taught me that.
In 2022 I moved to Basel, which made small repairs much easier to fit into a week. The spring light in Basel makes everything feel easier the second time. Weekends are usually split between baking bread on Sundays, the allotment and whatever is half-finished in a café near the coast path.