Grapes of Wrath

I was reading a recent entry at Astronomy Blog about what happens to a grape when held up to the eyepiece of a solar telescope, and it reminded me of grad school. We had a lab where students tracked sunspots to calculate solar rotation, and they projected an image of the Sun on a piece of paper to trace the sunspot locations. There was a mechanism to hold the paper in front of the eyepiece... but this pair of geniuses moved the apparatus aside so they could look through the telescope at the Sun. Think about that, revel in it for a moment. They looked at the telescope, saw the piece of metal in front of the eyepiece which was clearly designed to hold a piece of paper (of course the instructions in the manual also clearly outline how to mount your paper), and decided to move it aside. Then ...