22 July 2005

I have been searching every deli I go to for distilled water for the past two weeks. I need to clean my telescope mirror and the instructions for doing it say to use distilled water as a final rinse because it doesn't have anything in it that will be left behind on the mirror when the water evaporates. The instructions also say to put 1-2 drops of dishwashing liquid into that water to decrease its cohesion and make it sheet on the mirror so you have fewer water droplets to dry up before the evaporate and leave spots. So why won't that keep spring water or regular old tap water from spotting the mirror. I don't know. So I have been looking for little bottles and bypassing most of the gallon containers. I searched all of the bottled water sites on the Web to see what label I should be looking for although there are few I haven't seen by now. Most bottled waters are city water, spring water or filtered water and contain minerals which is what I don't want. Yesterday I finally hit pay dirt. My search turned up bottled water for sale at, of all places, Amazon. I didn't like the idea of mail ordering water but was getting desperate so went to the site. It turns out they have gallon jugs of White Rose distilled water and the vendor is NYC area Gristedes stores. Today I was out at one of the local markets and found said product on the shelves for $1.09. I am sure I would have paid more than that for one of those little bottles everyone carries around, if I had been able to find one. And it turns out I need the whole gallon anyway. The instructions in Astronomy Hacks say to pour it all over the mirror.