I’ve always been something of a backyard astronomer. I
remember being very young and harboring the belief that the sky was this
massive black dome and the stars were pinpricks which let light in from
whatever lay on the other side. It was
also about this time that I really started watching the moon from the backseat
every time we were driving after dark. I
didn’t understand how it always seemed to be moving at the exact same speed we
were, holding its position in the sky regardless of how fast or slow my parents
drove.
A little later on, I got one of those telescope kits for
either Christmas or my birthday. It came
with a microscope and the eyepieces were interchangeable, which sounds pretty
nice. But this was a kid’s telescope.
The focuser, like the rest of the telescope, was plastic and minute adjustments
were nearly impossible. The included
tripod was so small that I had to lay flat against the ground to look through
the refractor and offered very little in the way of balance. The slightest tap would send the thing wildly
off course, but I didn’t mind. While the
resolution wasn’t strong enough to view the planets pictured on the box, it did
allow me to see faint little blobs of light where the naked eye only saw darkness…
but very little else. Even the moon didn’t appear as close as the box had led
me to believe. It was actually easier and more comfortable to simply stretch
out in the grass, put my hands behind my head, and look up. While I ended up using the microscope way
more often than the telescope, that little toy clued me in that there was a lot
more going on up there than I’d first thought.
My grandfather had always been a hunter, which meant he had
a pretty good pair of binoculars, and when I’d spend the night at their house,
I’d wander into the backyard with the glasses slung around my neck … but still
no rings of Saturn or the moons orbiting Jupiter.
Flash-forward to my early twenties: I was living in the House of Hot Beverage with
my roommates Larry and Erin; out of the blue, my mom gifted me with a nice,
90mm refractor for apparently no reason at all.
It had a nice assortment of eyepieces and I remember standing in the
yard, looking at the Hale-Bopp comet as its interstellar trajectory passed our
own. Hale-Bopp was awe inspiring. The main body of the comet was like the
largest and brightest star I’d ever seen and twin tails shot out the back. Looking at the tails, I could certainly see
why early cultures associated comets with serpents and dragons. The tail looked exactly like a bifurcated tongue
of flame, each segment flickering and licking independently of the other.
A year or two later was my first year of marriage. My wife
and I were renting a trailer way back at the top of a ride, far removed from
the light pollution of Charleston. In the evenings we’d lay out on the deck,
gazing upward at a sky brimming with stars and try to pick out the fast moving
satellites orbiting the earth. Some simply looked like travelling stars, but
others seemed to wink as they crossed they sky. I would later learn that these
satellites were out of control and the flashing was created by the sun
reflecting off solar panels spinning wildly through space. But again, this was all naked eye stuff. The
telescope my mom had given me had come and gone, being a casualty when I moved
out of the House of Hot Beverage.
We’d been in Parkersburg around four or five years when my
next scope entered my life. Farrell and
Devin had given it to me for Christmas, allowing me to pick out the one I
wanted beforehand. It was a Meade
reflector with a four inch mirror, a red dot finder scope and computerized
go-to mount. With the attached controller, I could enter ascension and
declination coordinates and the drive motor would automatically move to the
object, slewing just enough to keep it centered, no matter how long I chose to
view it. Another nice feature were the
tours pre-programmed into the computer which would correlate the date, time, and my longitude and latitude and then guide the scope to the “highlights”
of the sky overhead. How long I spent on each one was entirely up to me as the
tour wouldn’t continue until I pressed the proper button on the controller.
My favorite thing to do was to lug the scope over to the
graveyard that was across the road from our house and start the evening off
with one of these tours. After that, I’d
spend an hour or so exploring the heavens with manual adjustments to the
scope and this is how I got my first
look at another galaxy. I just stumbled across it one night, this fuzzy little
patch of light in the sky; it was roughly ovular in shape and looked a bit like
a distant cloud. However I could see an arc of darkness near the center, which gave
the impression of an eyelid, and just below this arc was a bright, spherical
pupil. This was one of those moments in life which completely touched my soul.
It was as if I’d looked into space and discovered something looking back.
Since I knew the portion of the sky I’d saw it in and instantly
recognized it as either a galaxy or nebula, I immediately pulled out my planisphere upon returning home.
A few adjustments to the concentric rings and I saw that the only deep space
object in that section of the sky at the time I was viewing it was M64 in the
Messier catalog. Once I had the catalog
number, I was able to look it up in my field guide and identify it as the
appropriately named Black Eye Galaxy.
Shortly after this, I bought an 80mm refractor for times
when I just didn’t feel like hauling the Meade outside and messing with the
counterweights. It was through this
trusty little scope that my breathe was taken away when I decided to view M45,
better known as the constellation Pleiades. When viewing most stars, there’s a
lot of seemingly empty space surrounding them, even when viewed through a high
powered telescope. The Pleiades spring up in the eyepiece though as a densely
packed region of stars. There’s so many, in fact, that it looks like glitter
blown into the night sky from the cupped hand of God. This is, by far, my most-viewed object in the
sky. I have this connection to the constellation that’s kind of hard to
explain. When I’m viewing her, nothing else exists. I am completely and utterly at peace with
both myself and my place in the cosmos, so much so that it’s become a spiritual
experience. Anytime I spot Pleiades
overhead it’s almost as if it reaches out to touch my soul. I feel that same
sense of well-being and can’t help but smile as I whisper, “Hello, old friend…”
(true story, I actually do that).
I’ve also got a Celestron Powerseeker 127EQ reflector in my
stable now. Its six inch mirror provides
more aperture than my Go-To Meade did, but it lacks the bells and whistles. In
all honesty, I haven’t used this one much because collimating the mirrors is
kind of tricky, even with the help of a laser collimator; without them in
proper alignment you really can’t get quality detail, so I think I need to find
someone with a little more experience who’d be willing to walk me through the
process. I’ve tried looking it up on Youtube, but it’s just not quite the same
since you can’t ask a video questions.
Earlier today, my wife and I drove to the planetarium of a
local college for a viewing of the Cowboy Astronomer, followed by a star talk
describing what can be seen in tonight’s sky.
It was the first time I’d been in a planetarium since I was a kid and
the experience was everything I’d hoped it would be and more; it even inspired
my wife (who’s always been more into history and physical science than
astronomy) to come with me on one of my outings in the near future. It’s time to get that Celestron in working
order, so we both don’t have to take turns with the same scope but can independently
explore the cosmos and share what we find.
Which sounds like an awesome date to me.
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