bruce_glad2@space.com wrote:
-Hey, guys I was just wondering how long have you been doing astronomy for?
I started "seriously" looking at the sky with a telescope in about 1967 or 68, when I was about 10 years old. That is, that's when I started reading Sky & Telescope and learning the constellations, how to use setting circles, find objects, learn about optics, that kind of thing. I only had a 2.6-inch refractor and a 3" reflector. Only a year later, the parents of a good friend gave me an Edmund 4.25" f/11 equatorial reflector, when they got transferred to another city, rather than move it. And this INCREDIBLE thing happened at about the same time...a man landed on the moon! If you are too young to remember this, you should know that it was just the most remarkable, incredible thing. I mean big, BIG. For a while, everyone in the world felt a common bond of pride in our species. I recall Walter Cronkite shedding tears on-camera, speechless. I felt so proud to be a human being. Look what we did! People were jumping up and down, yelling "We're on the Moon! We're on the Moon!". Every boy in America had a model of a Saturn-V rocket in his room. How could a kid not be enthralled with the stars? So I guess that I'm a product of my times, and I've been doing this for almost 35 years. That said, there are couple of list members that I know have more years at it than I! (Eh, Brent? No, it's not true that Brent saw Halley's comet in 1910. Or that he mowed Percival Lowell's lawn for pocketmoney as a boy. It was Clyde Tombaugh's lawn.) Chuck ;) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com