He’s had no better peer than one through telescope
Iwas quite young, still counting my years on one hand, when one evening we visited friends of my parents. I don’t know who they were, and I never saw them again. To my boyish eyes, the gentleman and lady seemed quite distinguished. In spite of our barely intersecting life paths, they helped spark an interest that has stayed with me all my life. In fact, I sometimes wonder if I chose the wrong career path.
After sunset, the gentleman set up a long, slender, wonderful device that he called a telescope. I had never seen one, and I fell immediately under its spell.
Unfortunately, the gentleman and the other adults were obsessed with the fear that I would fall onto or knock over the telescope. If I came within five feet of it, they would all shriek in that annoying adult way, “Don't touch it! Don't touch it!”
Evidently, at that age I would have caused an explosion if I touched a telescope. I wasn’t sure if the telescope would explode or I would. Or maybe whichever one exploded first would cause a chain reaction explosion in the other. Maybe it was filled with dynamite. Whatever the case, they wanted me nowhere near that scope.
Finally, they relented, and I got to peek into the scope. At least seven adult hands were on me, holding me up, back, and away, with my eyeball pointing in the general direction of the eyepiece.
But it was worth it. For when I looked in, I saw the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. It shone with a cool brilliance that burned itself into my mind, leaving an after-image that would never fade.
The gentleman called it Saturn.
I suppose you could say I was planet-struck rather than star-struck, but love doesn’t care what you call it. I was hooked. I became a skywatcher, forever lifting my head to see what the heavens held.
When I was 16, I used some money I’d saved to buy a telescope at Kaufmann’s, Downtown. It was a common Tasco 60mm refractor, with three eyepieces and a Barlow 2x lens.
It came packaged in a sturdy wooden box the size of a walrus coffin. I had taken the bus to town, and that was the only way home. Have you ever ridden a crowded bus at rush hour while carrying a walrus coffin? Let’s just say I was not a popular boy that day.
I received many strange looks. Fortunately, being a future engineer, I was used to that. While jockeying the coffin on, around and off the bus, I destroyed maybe five or six knees, nearly half of which were mine. A fair enough price for the Tasco, I figured.
The lights of Pittsburgh didn’t make for the best celestial viewing, and our Mount Washington home was certainly awash in the city’s glow. But the secondstory porch faced away from town, and I observed what I could — Venus, Mars and the easiest target of all, the moon.
I loved looking at craters within craters, exploring the smooth-as-glass plains and scanning the lunar terminator for nighttime mountains thrusting their peaks into the high sunlight, creating diamonds scattered across the jet-black lunar surface. I couldn’t make out Neil and Buzz, though. Maybe if I looked at the telescope through the binoculars? No, that didn’t work.
I battled Pittsburgh’s mostly cloudy skies many times, and seldom was the victor. The light from a celestial object would travel millions of miles toward the aperture of my telescope, only to be stopped a mile or so shy by a cloud deck. It was frustrating, at least for me, and I suspect for the light beam as well. That’s a long way to travel for nothing.
I thought it would be a dream come true to be a professional astronomer, but eventually I decided on the more “practical” career of engineering. My parents’ generation, having suffered through the Great Depression, generally didn’t encourage pursuing off-thebeaten-path careers with dubious income potential. Young people would dream about being archaeologists or ornithologists or astronomers, but few pursued those dreams.
But sometimes I look up at the sky, and I can’t help but wonder what might have been, even if it was star-lit poverty.