I was born in 1975, have two brothers and a sister, and grew up on a farm outside of the tiny town of Ontario, Wisconsin. I've been an amateur astronomer since, I'd guess, around the start of 1986, when I was 10 years old.
I remember looking for, and possibly finding Halley's Comet in the western sky after sunset. It's not clear to me if Halley's Comet was what got me interested in space, or if the timing was just coincidental. My memories of those days are vague and disjointed. At one point I joined the Lutheran Pioneers, led by a local Lutheran pastor and a high school science teacher, and I remember they pointed out a few of the constellations. I remember Cassiopeia in particular. I also remember visiting an aunt and uncle's farm, and they had a telescope set up in a window in their house and I got my first hands-on experience with a telescope, pointing it out a window. I don't believe I pointed it at the sky at all, just a light mounted on a pole, but I was mesmerized by the magnified view.
Later, my parents bought a small table-top refractor from Sears. I remember using it with an included eyepiece sun filter, pointing it through the front window of our house to look at sunspots. This telescope was quickly returned for a larger one, a 60mm refractor with a tripod. I remember my first experience looking at a bright star with it: it was a large fuzzy ball that just didn't look right to me, so I experimented with the focuser knob and learned that even when magnified, stars remain tiny little pinpoints.
I found the book "Peterson Field Guide to the Stars and Planets" at the local library and kept it checked out as long and as often as I could. Reading this book was the pivotal experience that hooked me on astronomy for the rest of my life. I learned about the planets, and about open clusters, and I viewed some of them with the telescope.
I experienced moments of rapture at the eyepiece, where the fuzzy image in the eyepiece would be replaced with an indescribably clarity as I envisioned the true nature of the objects I was looking at. I remember looking at a tight open cluster of stars and feeling as if I were suddenly some sort of ethereal creature of enormous size viewing a real-life diorama of stars, where the stars were tiny sparks to me instead of the gigantic globes of plasma that they really are. To me they seemed clustered together like friends or family, always there for each other, for eons. The hair on my arms would stand on end as a feeling of awe washed over me.
I am divorced and have one son who prefers guitars over telescopes.
Job
Cost Clerk
Hobbies
Computers, Video Games, Movies
