How did you start?Posted By David Gale |
The thread by the beginner about buying his first scope brought a question to my mind. How did you get interested in astronomy? My theory is that most of us did it mostly on our own, discovering things for ourselves.
About 20 years ago my wife bought me a telescope for my birthday from a department store, luckily it was somewhat usable and stable at low powers(Jason comet catcher 3" Scmidt-newtonian). I remember my first view of the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter. It was amazing, but I didn't know how to find anything else so lost interest for a few years.
Later I subscribed to sky and telescope and read an article on star hopping and ordered the Tirion Sky atlas 2000. I piked an M object at random from the fold out star charts in sky and tel(M5 if I remember correctly) and took a long time with my low power eyepiece hopping from star pattern to star pattern, getting lost, starting over and finally getting there and seeing the fuzzball that was obviously not a star and thinking that that was so cool. The next object I tried was M97 because it looked like it would be easy to find being placed right there in the big dipper. Needless to say my little scope showed no sign of it. I knew I needed a bigger scope.
So when I finally had some money quite a few years later I did a little research on the internet but basically just jumped in blind and purchased my current scope a 10" discovery pdhq. Of course this opened everything up for me and the views were astounding. I remember just going out with the Tirion star atlas and star hoping to what ever looked interesting on the map. The discovery that sticks out most in my mind is when I had been seeing objects in Sagittarius and moving up the sky and came to m11 on the atlas. Now on the atlas m11 doesn't look like much, but you can imagine what I felt like when I looked through the eyepiece.
Sorry this post is so long but it was necessary to make a point. No one had ever showed me the moon, Saturn, Jupiter or m11 in a scope. I "discovered" these on my own and have been hooked ever since. I think if I had had people showing me all these objects before I owned a scope a lot of the thrill of the discovery would have been gone. I show my son stuff all the time and he says "yeah that's neat", but there seems to something missing. Maybe I should have just given him a 6" dob and a star chart and said go discover for yourself. How many of you discovered most everything on your own and how many of you had lots of help and still developed a passion for it?
About 20 years ago my wife bought me a telescope for my birthday from a department store, luckily it was somewhat usable and stable at low powers(Jason comet catcher 3" Scmidt-newtonian). I remember my first view of the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter. It was amazing, but I didn't know how to find anything else so lost interest for a few years.
Later I subscribed to sky and telescope and read an article on star hopping and ordered the Tirion Sky atlas 2000. I piked an M object at random from the fold out star charts in sky and tel(M5 if I remember correctly) and took a long time with my low power eyepiece hopping from star pattern to star pattern, getting lost, starting over and finally getting there and seeing the fuzzball that was obviously not a star and thinking that that was so cool. The next object I tried was M97 because it looked like it would be easy to find being placed right there in the big dipper. Needless to say my little scope showed no sign of it. I knew I needed a bigger scope.
So when I finally had some money quite a few years later I did a little research on the internet but basically just jumped in blind and purchased my current scope a 10" discovery pdhq. Of course this opened everything up for me and the views were astounding. I remember just going out with the Tirion star atlas and star hoping to what ever looked interesting on the map. The discovery that sticks out most in my mind is when I had been seeing objects in Sagittarius and moving up the sky and came to m11 on the atlas. Now on the atlas m11 doesn't look like much, but you can imagine what I felt like when I looked through the eyepiece.
Sorry this post is so long but it was necessary to make a point. No one had ever showed me the moon, Saturn, Jupiter or m11 in a scope. I "discovered" these on my own and have been hooked ever since. I think if I had had people showing me all these objects before I owned a scope a lot of the thrill of the discovery would have been gone. I show my son stuff all the time and he says "yeah that's neat", but there seems to something missing. Maybe I should have just given him a 6" dob and a star chart and said go discover for yourself. How many of you discovered most everything on your own and how many of you had lots of help and still developed a passion for it?
