I came by the hobby of Astronomy easily, sort of a natural thing. When I was about 12, I would go and borrow my fathers binoculars, and by adjusting them just right, I found I could set them on top of the "V" of the dog house, prop up the opposite end of the dog house, and use it as a holder to steady the glasses. My favorite object was the moon. The craters really showed up well, and all I had to do was move the doghouse around a bit now and then to stay lined up. I spent hours looking at the moon when I was a kid. Easily amused, I guess.
By the time I was a frosh in high school, I had developed an overall general interest in science, and in high school I was introduced to a teacher by the name of Mr. Bisbee. He was the science teacher at Marshall High in Portland Oregon, and one of his great interests was using a home built 4 1/4 inch reflecting telescope to take photographs of sun spots. He not only built the telescope, he built the camera, he built the mount, and he developed his own film! I think he probably would have made the film too, but he ran out of time.
He took some great pictures of the Sun ( along with a lot of other subjects), and I became fascinated with the prospect of building my own telescope. With his encouragement and guidance, I procured a mirror grinding kit from Edmund Scientific, a science supply house.
The little telescope I put together from that kit was mediocre at best. To this day I don't know what became of it. It just got lost in the shuffle. One thing that did come from that project was a sharpened interest in astronomy.
Years later, after I was married, I expressed my interest in obtaining a good telescope, and Karen being the supportive kind of girl she is, let me go for it. So I purchased a Celestron 8" catadioptric motor driven telescope for the tune of nearly $2000. That was a lot of money back then (still is), and I spent a lot of all nighters out on the mountain using the scope visually and photographically. I learned a lot with that scope. Here is a list of some of the more prominent things I learned...
1) That's a lot of money to have tied up.
2) It gets COLD at night, especially in the winter, and sometimes even in the summer.
3) Its hard to go to work the next day, after you have been up all night hunched over a telescope.
4) You can get one dozy of a neck ache doing long term guided astrophotography.
And the math. Here is the math...
Out of, say, 30 days in a month, there will be nearly 15 on which the moon is out bright enough that deep sky observing is of little use. Out of the 15 days remaining, it will be very hard to stay out all night 10 of them, because you need to go to work the next day. Out of the 5 days remaining, most of them will be cloudy. But for the sake of optimism, lets say just one is. That leaves 4 days. Of the 4 remaining days, one will be too windy, one will have so much dew that the optics keep fogging up, and one the upper atmosphere will be dancing around so much you can't see anything.
If I have done the math correctly (probably not, knowing my ability with math), that leaves just one day a month. On a good month. Then there's the winter, but lets not get into that.
ANYWAY...one day a month times 12 months is 12 days A YEAR to effectively use that $2000 investment. That is just not much of a return on an investment. I sold that telescope after 3 years or so and used the money to build a deck on my house. Something I used nearly everyday!
But the bug was still with me, and after a little while, I realized I still wanted a telescope. This time I decided that I would build one, to keep costs down. So starting from scratch, I built a mirror grinding machine, then ground the mirror, then built the tube assembly. This was a real long term project, mind you. I think I managed to stretch it out over about 15 years or so.
All in all, I think I have about $400 dollars invested in this scope. And about 1000 hours. Well, maybe not that many, but a lot. I lost track somewhere along the way. But I have not lost track of the enjoyment that scope has brought to me, my kids, and others. God's creation is a marvelous thing.
If you would like to see a picture of the scope click on the link below. If you are interested in astronomy, and have any questions or comments, fire off an e-mail and we can talk
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