How it started

Date: March 8, 1978.

Very good night out. It was clear but not cold. The temperature was 24F at 9:15 pm.

I saw for the second time the Andromeda galaxy. It was exceptionally fine, unlike the first time I saw it. I did not do a drawing of it because I did not have time.

I found out how to use the setting circles on my telescope. They worked very well. I didn’t index to anything important because I was too excited. But they seemed to be working fine.

I also noted when I was looking at the Orion Nebula at about 9:00 a satellite. It moved into my field of view and I followed it almost to Jupiter!

Date: March 9, 1978.

I went to the park and setup there. The seeing conditions were very good, but there were too many car lights. But I did get some stuff done.

First of all I saw a meteor. It lasted for about 5 seconds and was very bright. Then I turned to Jupiter and saw its equatorial bands again. I changed to high power and was only disappointed.

I also found Saturn again. It was as good as ever. I could see one division in the rings and one line on the planet itself. I turned to high power and it looked very good. This is what it looked like:

I also saw a thing, I think it was Uranus or Neptune because it was too small of a disk to be Venus and it looked kind of greenish. But I could not make much out of it because it was so low on the east horizon and the turbulence was very bad.

I also saw one of the moons of Mars, probably Phobos.

The journal entries quoted above are from a few pages I have kept with me the past 30 years. Out of vanity, I won’t tell you how old I was when I wrote them.

At the time, my family and I were living in suburban Chicago. And in spite of the less-than-ideal setting, this is when and where I guess I got my start in astronomy.

The observations I wrote about were made with a six-inch reflecting telescope that was bigger and heavier than me at the time. This was not my first telescope, however. My first was a small K-mart refractor, from Santa. I bought the six-inch scope on the standard Furton family capital purchasing plan: I covered half of the cost with funds from my paper route; the other half was covered by the heads of the household.

The scope, alas, I jettisoned in bits and pieces over the years. I’ve bought and made other telescopes, and I’ve looked through some of the largest telescopes in the world, but none can outdo the one that gave me the first good look at so many things that were (and still are) out of my reach.

I still enjoy viewing the celestial objects I first enthusiastically discovered more than 30 years ago. And even though amazing images of the moon, planets, nebulae, stars and galaxies are available in picture books and on the Internet, no picture on a printed page or image on the biggest, brightest computer display comes close to capturing the essence of Saturn, for example, when you catch a glimpse of it from your own back yard with your own eyes.

Thank you for reading – and sometimes writing back. For what I like most is sharing with others the small bit of wonder that has remained with me since I was a child.