On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. Up until then I had only been mildly interested in astronomy. At this point in my life there was absolutely no chance that I would even go to college, let alone become a scientist of any sort. I was intensely interested in science and the start of the Space Age thrilled me at a time when there was not much in my life to thrill anybody. My parents were mostly dirt poor (depending on whether my father found a contracting job) and my father was (as we found out later) bipolar, with the emphasis on the manic phase. I was being kept home from school because of a supposed respiratory condition (I wrote about this in another diary), but despite my isolation, I had a fair amount of freedom. Christmas of 1956 had miraculously brought the present of a three-inch Spitz Moonscope, which had languished in a closet over the spring and summer, but with the launching of Sputnik I hauled the little toy telescope out and started spending time at night on a canal bank, locating the constellations and planets. For a while my one friend at the time, Dick (a neighbor boy), went with me, but he got bored while I got the bug. Soon I was staying out late with my little telescope and a golden guide to the Stars and Planets. I soon learned the winter constellations. I also gained some solitude and separation from my parents and felt a bit of happiness for the first time in years.
My one good photo of the Moon from Mesilla Park, New Mexico, taken with a telephoto lens many years after my first love affair with astronomy.
By Easter of 1958 I was really hooked, but I could not afford a better telescope. Still I rigged up an eyepiece from a cheap hand-held microscope that my father had picked up. It produced double images, but it gave me a boost of about twice the 32X of the Moonscope. At this time my father was attending one of the churches in Yuma and was up early for the sunrise service. I asked him to wake me at 4 AM and I went out to see a preview of the summer constellations and to locate the planet Saturn. It was my first view of the rings and double image or not, it was a real thrill!
The Moon, Venus and Jupiter from Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
I started saving money, which was not easy to come by. Eventually I saved enough from odd jobs to buy a ca, $20 refractor (42 mm) from Edmund. It was far from ideal, but with it I found the Crab Nebula, the Lagoon Nebula, the Omega Nebula and a host of star clusters. It had no finder scope and was not equatorial (not able to follow the tilt of the earth to keep objects in at least the same level), but I was immensely pleased with it. The euphoria lasted until later that year when my father moved us to a remote farmhouse in the Yuma Valley, where things truly went to hell. My mother became suicidal and I spent hours walking with her in the sand dunes trying to talk her out of it. My father was no help and as was his bent made a bad situation worse.
For many years thereafter I tried to recoup the happiness of those few months I spent on the canal bank under a perfectly black sky ablaze with stars. I remembered the smell of citrus blossoms and the calls of toads in the canals, but I never got the sense of absolute freedom and bliss back. Difficult parents can definitely screw up one's life, but I somehow overcame all that, at least professionally, due in part to hard work and to a number of wonderful people who helped me along the way. I freely admit that I am not a self-made man. Through this period I toyed with astronomy, first buying an Edmund 4.5 inch Newtonian reflector while I was in Tucson and, after I had married and finally left my parents, an Edmund Astroscan. I joined an astronomical society and became friends with several professional astronomers, one of whom helped me (actually it was I who helped him) build a 10-inch Newtonian reflector (the mirror donated by another professional astronomer), mounted on a lawn mower carriage (see below). It was the best telescope that I had ever owned and with it I saw Saturn's rings, Jupiter's cloud bands and Great Red Spot, the pole caps and Syrtis Major on Mars, and the stains on Jupiter's atmosphere where Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck, as well as numerous galaxies, open and globular clusters and galactic nebulae.
The lawn mower telescope.
During the period from the late 1950s into 1980s I got the chance to visit several professional observatories. My friend Dick and I took his Volkswagen Bug to Mt. Palomar in San Diego County, California, and I visited the National Observatory at Kitt Peak and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, both in Arizona. I also heard lectures by Gerard Kuiper and Fred Hoyle (I never really understood him!) and took a correspondence course from the University of Chicago taught by George A. Van Biesbroeck, whom I later met at the University of Arizona when he retired there.
Kitt Peak National Observatory.
Eventually I grew too busy in my biological research to use the telescope and it languished in my shed. Finally I sold it at construction cost to an older amateur and I never really went back. In the years since 1958 I was never able to recover the utter peace that I had under the stars at night on the canal in the Yuma Desert, but I remembered the time with fondness. I still occasionally look at the night sky with binoculars and even observe an astronomical event, such as the recent elipse of the sun.
Projection of the eclipse of the sun, 2012, along the Rio Grande west of Mesilla, New Mexico.
While camped on the Camino del Diablo in southern Yuma County many years after my first interest I saw the stars again as they appeared to my eager eyes in 1958. Among the myriad of stars I located a smudge of light - Halley's Comet - making its disappointing return in 1985. For a little while a bit of that peace came back to me and I was back on the canal, safe among the stars.
All photos, such as they are, by me. I know several wonderful astrophotographers, but I am not one.