To the extent possible under law, the contributors to this project have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States. The project home is https://github.com/fordsfords/astronomy/tree/gh-pages. To contact me, Steve Ford, project owner, you can find my email address at http://geeky-boy.com. Can't see it? Keep looking.

My Introduction to Astronomy

When I was about 10 years old, I got a telescope from my parents. I have no idea how good of a scope it was, although I do remember that it went up to 400 power.

I had a lot of fun for a month or two looking at the moon. I also found the Orion nebula fascinating.

And that's it.

That is all I found.

Oh sure, I pointed the scope at numerous stars. And I discovered that when you look at a little white dot with a telescope, you see a little white dot.

And I looked and looked for planets. But I had no idea where to look or what they would look like if I found them. I decided that planets must be soooooo far away that I needed a much better scope than I had to see even the slightest disk.

I was wrong.

Even a very modest telescope can see a small disk for Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter. And that same modest scope can see Saturn's ring.

And I didn't even know about all of the deep-space objects that are out there, well within the reach of a modest scope.

Also, the Internet didn't exist back then, so my ability to learn about the stars was limited by what I could find in the local library. I never found a book that showed me how to use my telescope to find interesting objects.

I tried once or twice a month for about a year to use the scope, and I met with frustration and disappointment. Finally, being an engineer at heart, I took the scope apart and played with the neat lenses. Eventually, I got it back together and we sold it at a garage sale for maybe $25 (I don't remember for sure).

Needless to say, neither of my parents, nor anybody else for that matter, showed the slightest interest in the telescope. Nobody made any attempt to help me find anything. I was left on my own and I failed.

Now move the clock forward about 30 years . . .

It's 1997, the year of my 40th birthday. It's early spring, and my birthday is still 9 months away. But comet Hale-Bopp is on it's way, and it promises to be the best sight in the sky in many years.

Since the comet would be gone by the time my birthday came around, my wife made me 40 years old a bit early. In May (or was it June?), she got me a telescope - an 8-inch Celestron "Celestar-8".

Ironically, a good telescope is a bad way to look at a comet like Hale-Bopp. The comet was spread across such a large area of the sky that even the lowest power magnified the comet too much. The best views of the comet were had from simple binoculars. Even so, I loved the telescope from the moment I saw it.

Thank goodness for the Internet. My wife and I were able to learn all about telescopes and how to use them. I'm completely hooked on astronomy now, and I mourn the lost opportunities of 30 years ago. It is that sense of loss, and the passion that I now feel, that prompted me to write my astronomy web pages.

I hope that my Parent's Guide to Children's Telescopes" will help prevent this from happening to at least a few promising young astronomers.

Sfordsez: if you haven't seen my standard disclaimer and copyright at http://www.geeky-boy.com/standard.html then check it out now.