Planet Crash!

It's been almost a year since my last post here.  Too long. Last year was not a good year for observing. My ETX has all but died as the handbox keys just don't want to work. Furthermore my neighbors are getting more and more paranoid every year and I'm now surrounded by motion detector lights: one to the N and one to the S in back, one to the S in front, and a light that seems to be a car headlight mounted on the neighbor's porch across the street and pointed at my house! If the light pollution wasn't bad enough, the end of January through me into the hospital for a few days with a subdural hematoma. That pretty much laid me low for 4-6 weeks. After that we got a call from a neighbor who wanted to buy our property in MO so we ended up selling out and moving to TX full time. We now own a lovely house in a neighborhood where the streets are named after objects de astro. Our street is named Aquarius so I guess that makes this the dawning of the age of Aquarius where Jupiter aligns with Mars etc etc (a good show!). Except this week Jupiter is definitely NOT aligning with Mars, it's Saturn! Jupiter is aligning with Venus and boy are they putting on a show. Venus is fairly racing through the sky and tonight shot right past Jupiter slowly slogging along. Clouds in the west threatened to ruin the show last night and tonight both but they pretty much dissipated and both planet pairs were gorgeous. I wasn't able to make out Mercury yet, it's just too low in the haze from my place.
I also decided to participate in Loss of Night's latest citizen science project and did a couple of 8 star observations with their app. At 9:15 or so the limiting magnitude reported by the app was about 2.5. Not bad for a place that is in perpetual twilight. I whined and fretted enough that the neighbors all turned off their outside lights on my side of their house so it's not too bad. I took all of mine down and actually got a thank you from two of the neighbors! Now if I could just turn off a few street lights. Maybe those second amendment folks can help out??
I had to use binocs since my ETX's new 497 handbox also bit the dust. This time the display is bad. One with bad keys, the other with a bad display. I think it's time to get a new scope.
We also found time to run over to Harlingen today and picked up a couple of mystery caches for the latest geocache mission project. We found 8nut's square root day cache and the Heritage Museum's cache. That one was fun as we got to take a quick look at their cigar box banjo exhibit and the  historical buildings on site.   Definitely worth a return trip.