Astronomy Geek

I am a geek for being out and about at night.  I think the most beautiful sunrises come at the end of the night rather than the beginning of the day.  Sometimes I think I was meant to be a jazz musician playing in all night clubs.  Though that career path was somewhat limited by my inability to play a musical instrument and by a fairly astute sense that I have no idea what makes jazz jazz.

However, loving the night air did make astronomy an attractive hobby, and for a short time, until I realized I’d be required to do hard math, a possible career path.. In fifth or sixth grade, there were cold winter nights when some of us neighborhood kids would hang out in Dave’s backyard to admire the stars.  Dave was the honored host because he owned a working refractor telescope, a four inch lens, as I recall.  And his backyard was bigger and darker.

I don’t know about the other neighborhood guys, but I was then, and still am, overwhelmed at times by the immensity of the night-sky Universe and the mystery of what might be going on out there, in plain sight, but so far away.

Romancing the Stars

In the maddening way of meteorology, the colder the night, the clearer the stars.  So it often wasn’t long before we were housebound watching Lost in Space – goofy premise – or Star Trek – The original series with James Tiberius Kirk. But whether in backyard fact or living room fiction, it was the names of stars and the places they evoked, real or imagined, that wooed me. Perhaps that was just me, since I had a weird-for-a-kid interest in words.

Aldebaran (“the follower,”) Fomalhaut (“mouth of the fish,”), Deneb (“tail,”) Altair (“flying eagle,”) Scorpius (scorpion.)  These are real stars shining in the Earth’s night sky.  But, for me, the names triggered images of impossibly far away worlds orbiting exotic stars, flaming skies on planets circling red giants, odd pinwheels of light from double star systems, and a whole lot more.  As might be apparent, I read a lot of astronomy books and was in love with artist interpretations of alien worlds.

Building a Telescope

Around this same time I spent more time, much more time, poring over copies of Sky and Telescope magazine and the Edmund Scientific catalogue then, say, Playboy Magazine.  In those way-before-Internet-porn days, the science stuff was much easier to come by, and, while girls were fascinating, I really wanted to own a telescope.  For star gazing, you know.

In sixth grade, I began grinding a telescope mirror in my basement.  I completed the proper curvature in the six-inch diameter glass blank.  Along the way I learned a lot about optics, but in the end I couldn’t afford to have the glass silvered, so you can’t actually say it is a mirror.

Of course, girls eventually grew more intriguing.  Then sports, and then cars overtook my interest in astronomy.  But, I’m proud to say, the curved mirror blank is still in my possession.

In the end, the only other piece of potential telescope I bought was the aluminum tube that would be the body of the scope. In some sort of cosmic mystery I  purchased the tube as a boy in my native Indiana, and I have spent my entire adult life in Colorado, but that tube is in my sister’s basement in Connecticut.  But it is there in Connecticut should I ever get a hankering to complete that telescope.

Rocketry

During this same period my friends and I discovered Estes Rockets.  We glued balsa wood fins and nose cones to cardboard tubes, inserted a solid propellant rocket motor a little bigger than a lipstick tube into the rear of the tube, and then a thin, chemical coated wire into the rocket motor.  When we applied battery current to the wire, it heated up and ignited the propellant and, with a particular sound that is really is best described as a whoosh, the rocket was on its way.

We’d set up our launch pad in the middle of the street, or more preferably on the high school football field.  Sometime after that rocket phase was subsumed by the girls, cars, and sports teen boy trifecta, I surgically inserted a rocket tube into the back of a plastic model car, I think it was a Mercury. I remember I had painted it maroon.

We took it out on the street and lit the fuse.  It screamed off south towards Club Lane, elevating without wings and then flipping over on its back, skidding to a stop a good block away.  Awesome!  We repeated it a few more times until the Mercury got crunched by a real life Chevy.

Life goes on.  People buy telescopes now instead of making them.  Around cities you pretty much have to belong to a model rocket club to not get arrested for launching.  Where I live, city lights drown out most of the stars.  However, it’s still possible to get the parts I need to finish that telescope, and it’s really not too much of drive into the mountains where the pine scented night air wraps around you and the stars seriously spangle the sky.  Hmm.

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