Caleb C. Cannon

This blog receives a lot of spam. Most of which gets deleted right away. Lately I’ve been getting spam that doesn’t contain any advertisements but doesn’t make any sense in the context of the page. This leads me to think this not-advertisment spam is some sort of probe spammers are using to determine how many comments get posted to this page. Typically the comments are taken from book so often enough they aren’t picked up by the spam filter. Today I received this:

I saw tonight in the observatory, through Alvan Clark’s telescope, the Dumb-Bell nebula in the Fox and Geese Constellation… I have rarely been so much gratified… Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime… What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair as you ascend; - that this is the road to the stars. Every fixture and instrument in the building, every nail and pin, has a direct reference to the Milky Way, the fixed stars, and the nebulae, and we leave … the Americas and history at the door when we come in.

According to the Commonwealth Observatory at the University of Kentucky the quoted text was written in a journal by Ralph Waldo Emerson.