How I became an Amateur Astronomer
May 2006 :
I don’t remember becoming an amateur astronomer. In all my time on this planet, I haven’t one memory of not appreciating the night sky; or the daytime sky for that matter. When does one cross the line from every day citizen to that strange creature who must venture into the night looking for who-knows-what, behind a star?
The term amateur astronomer to me suggests one who studies the sky without that study being financially sustaining. This hasn’t always been true for me in my celestial adventure through life, as I did have a column in The Providence Journal titled The Sky for years. At that time, it was a matter survival. I was a poor freelance journalist. The sky, I hate to admit, was my bread and butter. When I found out it could earn me a partial living, I was even more appreciative. There was also a strange need to try and draw others into my mad avocation! However, it wasn’t always like this. There was a simpler, less desperate time. Remembering back to when I was a child, the night itself held a great fascination to my young senses. I found I loved the dark. It felt protective, a safe haven.
Living on the top floor of a three story tenement afforded me views of the sky in all four directions. The Moon especially caught my attention. As it rose in the east in its full phase, I would turn out the lights in my living room and watch the beam of lunar light slowly move across the walls and eventually onto the floor where I would lay, accepting of this odd silent friend outside my window. It didn’t really matter to me what the Moon was. Its light was strangely soothing. I would even play with my toys on the floor, in the moonlight!
Facing southward, or what I know now as southward, I would sit and watch the Moon and stars travel across the sky during the magical night.
One of my most vivid dreams at this tender age is the brightest stars in that southward sky (probably the Orion, Canis Major area) actually coming down to my window, entering, and floating around the room! Just beautiful points of light, alighting like snowflakes.
In the waking hours, I would place a piece of a broken mirror on the window sill to reflect those stars trying to replicate my dream experience.
I think these very early feelings were the foundation of my life-long love of astronomy.
Another very special influence in becoming an astronomer was my dear mother. She too had a special affinity for the firmament and all of nature. Nature was, although she never actually said it, her religion. As I once revealed in a personal epitaph placed in the local newspaper on one anniversary of her passing: She loved the Moon, the storms, and the twinkling summer stars.
One night, she took me out on the back porch, to the north facing side of our venerable three-decker and pointed to the sky. There, a curtain of flowing color and beams of light silently undulated. I stood mesmerized as my mom explained they were the northern lights. She had once stood under them with her mother who told her they were caused by the reflection of sunlight off icebergs in the North Pole! Wow! My mind raced at six years old! That vision stuck with me for many years and many auroras. From that night on I wanted to learn more about this realm that held so much beauty. My mother knew everything about the sky I soon discovered. She showed me the Big Dipper and told me stories about the Milky Way.
By the time I was twelve, she had bought me my first astronomy book, The Sky Observers Guide. I explained to her the real reason the aurora borealis occurs, and silently thanked her for implanting a vision that encouraged me to want to keep learning more about it.
Soon after, she and my older sister chipped in their hard earned-in-the-mills money to buy me my first telescope for Christmas. I was on my astronomical way, never to look back! Today, amateur astronomy gives me the pleasure of good friends and technical exercise for my non-technical brain.
Skyscrapers and Seagrave Observatory has embraced and influenced me from a young teenager in 1963, who could have easily turned into a street punk, to the person I am now.
I actually grew up with some of my fellow star gazers here at Seagrave. I’m sure they too would agree with me that we’ve had the best of astronomical times!
