Hi Friends, I'm formerly SLC and know many of you. Started when 10 years old in 1927. Thin ATM only a year old. Cut disks with home made circle cutter and ruined a bunch. No other ATMer's around. Muddled along for a couple of years. Ground flats for a diagonal. Talked my way into the H.S. chem lab when 12 to silver it. Polished on road tar and fought with a brutal TDE..It was a 4.1/2" with 1/4" of edge masked out working at F14 with a spherical surface. Now at 84 I'm buried in the fun of developing flex mirror technology. Flex web site available soon. Regards- Bill Kelley "in vitreum veritas". ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent Watson" <brentjwatson@yahoo.com> To: <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 3:04 PM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Long time..
I just wish I could say that I taught Clyde Tombaugh to grind a mirror! I have been studying astronomy since the 40's though. I remember the book where I would color a face on the Sun in the picture of the Solar System. It ws called "A Golden Treasury of Natural History". I think I nearly had the astronomy portion memorized. Those were my first star charts, although I didn't use them until the early 60's.
Brent
--- Chuck Hards <chuckhards@yahoo.com> wrote:
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 ;)
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