Astronomy for Everyone

I was the oldest of four children, and the daughter of a university professor. For some reason that still isn’t clear to me, but for which I will be forever grateful, my father recognized and encouraged my fascination with science very early in my life. While other little girls got Barbie dolls for Christmas, I got such things as a microscope, a chemistry set, and, on Christmas Day of 1960, a telescope. It was a 3" Gilbert reflector and came with a star chart of the constellations, and of course, the proverbial instructions for use (some assembly required).

When it got dark, Dad set up the telescope for me in our backyard and we pointed it at the moon. Our first look through the eyepiece was not encouraging. "Whoa!!" Dad said. "We’ve got a problem here!" Indeed we had. The full moon had a large black square right in the middle. The square secondary, on a single stalk, had been mounted backwards. This did not, however, dampen my enthusiasm. Thus began a life-long love affair with the night sky.

The little cardboard tube, on its plastic tripod, eventually wore out and fell apart from use. It would be over 30 years before I obtained another telescope. In the meantime, I satisfied my love of astronomy in other ways. I read everything I could get my hands on; that same Christmas I had been given the Golden Guide to Stars and Planets, and a book on the Moon, complete with charts and pictures of lunar features. I still have both; the pages are worn and dog-eared from years of poring over the gems of information they contained. I learned to identify constellations and stars and spent hours staring up at the blackness of space, wondering if someone on a world around one of those distant suns was staring, just as I was, but toward Earth.

And of course, I was fascinated with the idea of space travel. I remember vividly watching rocket launches on television. How I envied John Glenn as he orbited Earth three times on February 20, 1962! And Vanguard 2, and the various Pioneer missions; I thought astronauts and others involved with our space program were the luckiest people in the world. I still do.

In 1968, I went off to college, to the University of Washington in Seattle, and what seemed like perpetually cloudy skies. I took an astronomy course and on rare occasions when the sky was clear, got to view objects through the telescope at the observatory on campus. A friend of mine had just purchased a Pentax camera, and had taken a beautiful picture of star trails, with Polaris in the center, and concentric circles of different colors around it. I took one look at that photograph, and decided that I had to try my hand at astrophotography, too. I saved my pennies, purchased a Pentax SpotMatic F of my own, and my friend Al and I started traipsing all over the Pacific Northwest, as time and money permitted, in search of the perfect shot. We chased eclipses, lunar and solar, and in 1973, climbed Mt. Rainier to photograph Comet Kohoutek. When we got our slides back, we were not particularly impressed. Later, we saw the pictures of Kohoutek that had been published in Sky and Telescope; and to this day, we are kicking ourselves for not sending ours in. My shot was good; Al’s was superb. We learned a valuable lesson - no guts, no glory.

One comic adventure we shared was during the solar eclipse in the fall of 1979. My SpotMatic F had been stolen in 1978, and I replaced it with a Pentax MX, the camera I still use today. Al and I, in addition to our own cameras, decided to go whole hog and rented a medium-format camera and a telephoto lens. The path of totality went through southern Oregon, so we got out maps and plotted and planned, and selected a spot southeast of Pendleton, OR, as the place most likely to have clear skies. That one-in-a-million shot was in the bag, we gloated. That weekend we loaded up the car, a beat-up Volkswagen bug, and drove to the appointed location. That in and of itself was an adventure; the car died three times on the way down. The morning of the eclipse, we awoke early, and popped our heads out of our respective tents - to find that the sky was completely overcast.

Panic set in. This would not do! We loaded up the car and started driving around the southern part of Oregon, frantically looking for blue sky. The eclipse was already in progress when we finally stopped the car, set up the cameras and started snapping. We used layers of exposed film as solar filters over the lenses of the cameras, and Ektachrome film. Although some of the cockiness had worn off because of the clouds, we were fairly confident that we had gotten at least half a dozen good photographs. We were just sure that Sky & Telescope would be thrilled to print the works of art that we, no doubt, had in our cameras. We dropped the film off as soon as we got back to Seattle (after 3 days of not showering, we made a real impression on the guy in the camera store) and hoped for the best. When my slides finally came back, they were utter disaster! Too many layers of exposed film, coupled with the fact that I had used Ektachrome, made the pictures of the partially eclipsed sun look like the moon! They were absolutely god-awful, with the daytime sky so dark blue, it looked like night. Needless to say, they were good for laughs, and not much else. Many of my other attempts at solar eclipse photography, with no motor drive and minimal equipment, were equally laughable.

In 1992, my husband, knowing how much I wanted to have a telescope again, bought me a 60mm refractor for our anniversary. It was a spotting scope and had a little table-top tripod. We set it up on the hood of our truck and pointed it at Jupiter. After many years of not having a telescope, I got my first look at the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and it brought tears to my eyes. Fortunately, my husband began to share my enthusiasm for the wonders of the night sky, and since then, we have become a three-telescope family.

After having a 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain for three years, I sold it in favor of a 10" f/6 Dobsonian, something I can lift and transport easily myself. I’ve logged literally hundreds of hours at the eyepiece, and have earned a Messier and a Herschel certificate. We’ve been to several star parties and have been blessed with the friendship of the nicest people in the world - other amateur astronomers. But as much as I love my telescope, I still spend many hours simply staring up at the night sky, with nothing more than my own eyes and a lawn chair. And I still wonder if someone like me, on a distant planet orbiting a distant sun in a distant galaxy, is staring up, wondering, too.