I say that life is basically made up of two types of people.  The kind who set limits and the kind who test those limits.  I would have said that the folks who tested the limits were generally trying to scratch an itch based on pecking order, and once they found the limit on the piece of machinery they were dealing with, they had subconsciously one-upped the guy who had built the machine. But I don’t say that anymore.

I tip my hat to the limit testers.

I’ve seen guys jump into Mustangs with the gas pedal already halfway down before they cranked her over.  I’ve seen men roll down their window at stoplights, in a sort of camaraderie with the fellow beside them whose engine sits there snapping and loping away until the light changes.  I’ve even seen old men try out the limits of new lawn mowers. 

I once heard of a grandma who wanted to test out her grandson’s new car.  The first thing she asked, “Does it have a sport mode?”  Her comment, while easing along at a clean 100 m.p.h., “You gotta speed up for curves you know,” tells me she sits right in the middle of the limit testers group.

My friend Wes is a limit tester.

But before I shed some light on his personality, let me explain to you how a telescope, or ‘scope’ in our slang, works.

The type of scopes that we used had a large mirror housed in the back, or bottom end.  I hear tell on some of the bigger scopes they have little cooling fans for that mirror as the light coming in heats them up enough to warp the mirror and distort the images.  Up towards the front of the scope, suspended on a thin shaft, is a much smaller mirror.  The big mirror in back collects the incoming light and beams it up to the small mirror in crystal clarity.  Situated directly above the small mirror is a housing that fits any number of strength eyepieces.  Thus, the little mirror becomes the same thing as a slide on a microscope, couching the specimen for you to look at and magnify with your eyepiece.  The key word, here, is magnify.

The date was June 5, 2012.  We, who had an interest in astronomy, were on point and ready.  There was a six-hour event set to happen that we didn’t want to miss.  The next time it is set to happen is 2117.  What I’m talking about here is the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.

There are a couple of things critical to catching this—the first is a scope, and the second is a filter for your scope.  I have explained the scope.  The filter looks like a lid that snaps over the open end of your scope and cuts the sun’s rays and power down to where your scope and your eye can handle the light and heat as it collects each of those and transmits them up to the small mirror hanging on the thin shaft and then up through the eyepiece, into your eye. 

My friend Wes didn’t have a filter for his 12-inch scope.  But he was just as determined to capture this event as the rest of us were.

Wes is a welder by trade and had just purchased a very nice auto-darkening welding helmet.  He called us up on the day of the event and told us that even though he didn’t have a filter for his telescope, he figured he could get his scope lined up and sighted in without looking down the eyepiece.  Then, when it was all set, he could use his welding helmet as a, sort of, filter.  He wondered what we thought.

We said no, you are crazy. 

At that point, though, we didn’t know that Wes was a limit tester. 

We found out, later, after his scope was all lined up and focused, Wes took his shiny nice new welding helmet and took a quick glance down his eyepiece.  We also found out, as a result of his heroic actions, that welding helmets don’t meet muster for filters on scopes.  There was a nice clear spot burned into its tinted lens. 

Seeing what his helmet looked like, Wes instinctively touched the glass aperture of the eye piece on his scope with his thumb, thus checking out another set of limits, this time that of his own personal equipment and that of the scope’s eyepiece.  A sizzling sound and a clearly defined thumbprint burned into the glass of the eyepiece proved both thumb and eyepiece to be at their outer limits.

If that eyepiece were still laying around somewhere, say, in Haskell County, I’d be tempted to pay a small sum to call it mine.  I’d mount it for display in my office. 

Underneath would be inscribed, “Pressed to the Limit.”