My Life as an Amateur Astronomer
February 2006 :
When I was younger, I received a telescope for Christmas one year. It had to be sometime in the early to mid 1960’s and had a long white tube, a wooden tripod and nice wooden box. It was a 60mm Tasco refractor.
Flash forward about 10 years to my sophomore year of high school. I was walking down one of the corridors in school one day, and bumped into a friend. He told me about an Astronomy club at the school and how there was a meeting that afternoon of the group being run by the physics teacher. Something about this must have caught my attention, because I showed up for that meeting and found myself unexpectedly immersed in nerd heaven. Here were others just like me, pale, pasty, un athletic and terribly interested in the sky. It was like a door had just been unlocked.
Shortly after discovering and joining the club, I got to attend my first observing session. We went to a local elementary school and set up in the yard in back. In those days, you could actually do something like this and not have blinding, poorly pointed security lights spoil the view. After a 10 year hiatus, my old Tasco refractor finally got to see first light. I was part of a crew that had a couple of pairs of binoculars, another small refractor and best of all, one of the members had a 6 inch Criterion reflector. It was hugely impressive at the time and I was hooked. I don’t remember what I saw thru my scope those first few times, but I do have distinct memories of not being able to find much at first. I didn’t know the constellations and couldn’t find anything other than the brightest objects.
Not long after this, I found out about Sky and Telescope magazine. I used the star charts in the middle of it to slowly and painfully work my way around the sky, starting from the Big Dipper out. Gradually I got a basic working knowledge of much of the sky and started working towards a goal that I had set. I desperately wanted to see the globular cluster, M13. I had seen a picture of it and a description somewhere, either in Sky and Telescope or in a book I found in my parent’s library, “The Fascinating World of Astronomy by Robert S. Richardson, which I still have to this day. For whatever reason, I was just fascinated by the thought of M13 and no matter how, had to find it for myself and see it with my little telescope.
Eventually, the time came and one night, I finally managed to locate the keystone in Hercules and then… there it was, M13! Small, but bright against an inky black backround, I could just barely start to resolve some of it’s individual stars. As jaded as I’ve become over the years after seeing it resolved to the core many times in much larger scopes, nothing can take away from the thrill of finding and seeing it for the first time.
Time went on, the little Tasco eventually fell by the wayside in favor of an 8 inch Criterion reflector that I got a year or so later and then larger and ever more different scopes seemed to keep coming and leaving. Over time, I went thru an 8 inch Cave Cassegrain, then a 10 inch, a 6 inch Jaegers refractor, then a 4 inch and eventually a 16 inch reflector, which has been the only one that I’ve consistently kept.
As to how I discovered the Skyscrapers, one of the members of my high school Astronomy club, had an uncle who was a member of a club in the then far off state of RI. In case you haven’t guessed, the club was the Skyscrapers and the uncle was John Bacon, some of you reading this will perhaps remember him. Until that time, I had no idea that such a thing as astronomy clubs even existed. My first visit to N. Scituate was in 1972. I was hooked. For a teenager, the old antique Clark refractor, the clubhouse and the observatory building were irresistible. There was even a real, legitimate outhouse in the woods on the grounds! I became a member and have spent a large part of both my remaining teenage years and my adult life at the grounds with friends that I have now known for over 30 years.
For me, the discovery of my love of astronomy has opened me to a fantastic world of incredible sights, travel to far off places and the ability to meet people who’s fame will fade long after that of the so called “stars” of today’s world.
So what do I remember from the past 30+ years as an amateur?
Well, there was the incredibly bright comet West in 1976 with it’s blue green tail and bright coma.
There was the time that a group of us went to Brown University to see Stephen Hawking speak. I will never forget the thrill of seeing the great man roll by my seat down the aisle, just a couple of feet away from me.
Another great memory was the trip a group of us took to Canada in 1979 to see a total eclipse of the sun.
I have gotten to meet the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, I have met the discoverer of the microwave backround radiation, Robert Wilson.
I learned how to grind telescope mirrors thanks to the generous instructions of member Ed Turco. I received awards for the scopes I made at Stellafane .
There have been numerous meetings, Astroassemblies, trips and other events, none of which would have happened without the existence of Skyscrapers.
As quickly as the past 30 years have flown by, I take comfort in knowing that Skyscrapers will be there and that there are lots more speakers, trips and huge amounts of food to look forward to.
