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Author: Gary Nugent
Like a lot of kids, my folks gave me a 60mm telescope for Christmas one year. The scope was a typical department-store brand - not very good - but to a 12-year old kid it opened up the universe.
Through it I got to see the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn. But
They say that as you get older, your memory plays tricks on you - you remember good things more than the bad. I remember lots of clear, frosty winter nights when I could point my 'scope at the moon and scan its disk for some feature I had not seen in relief before. These days, the skies seem to be cloudy much more frequently and the frosty winter nights are few and far between. I guess that's global warming for you!
Time moved on and I moved in and out of committee positions in astronomy societies, editing some magazines along the way (I now put my own ezine, called Photon - http://www.photonezine.com), together every couple of months). Astronomy became more about the bureaucracy of running clubs than about looking through a telescope. Then, in the late '90s, wanting to get back to my astronomical "roots", ( Next Page )
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