Hi there, my name is Liev and I’m a graphic design student at Leeds College of Art. I am basing my final major project on astronomy. I would like to know what first ‘hooked’ you into astronomy; what first captivated you about it, or maybe who.

For me, it was discovering my dad’s 1978 book The New Challenge of The Stars by Patrick Moore and David Hardy. It was the paintings of Mars and Neptune specifically, and the idea of other worlds orbiting the sun. I was about six.

If you would like to add something that could help to answer my question, that would be most helpful, and thank you.

(Incidentally, the work this will help to produce will form part of Leeds College’s Foundation Show around June 5th 2007)

I had read astronomy books for children when I was little. Probably even before I could read, I enjoyed the pictures. I thought they were cool. Pretty pictures. Neat ideas. But they stayed sort of storybook, even though I knew they were nonfiction.

Then on a summer vacation the family went out one night to a small college observatory when it was open to the public. We stood in line for a half-hour, an eternity for little me. And I saw Saturn through the telescope. And it had rings! And it was real, right up there in the night sky. Suddenly, for me, it existed.

The books became much more interesting.

I've shown Saturn to a lot of kids since I've been able. And it has rings!

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I was always fascinated by space travel, from my earliest recollections in the mid 1950's. But astronomy in particular: that was finding the English translation of Jean Texerau's slim book "How to Make a Telescope" on a forgotten shelf in my high school when I was sixteen or seventeen, I guess (I had not yet stumbled onto the Scientific American ATM books). The next year I took the money I got for graduation (Almost $100!) and bought an 8" pyrex blank and mirror-grinding materials from Edmund Scientific, along with a tube, diagonal and spider and a couple of eyepieces.

I spent most of my free time that summer grinding and polishing (and building a Focault knife-edge tester), producing what I am sure is a terrible mirror, and building a mount from plywood and 3" pipe fittings. The first thing I ever managed to get in the field and focussed was Saturn.

I was hooked.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I think it was John Glenn's orbital flight. I stayed home from grade school, and had a globe and a crayon, and drew his position on the globe while Walter Cronkite talked from our little black and white TV.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Thank you for taking the time to answer folks I really appreciate it.

No problem. And welcome to the board, Liev!

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

When I was a kid , we have a place here called Planetarium , where they have this big dome and when the lights off , it transforms it to a Universe with full of stars and planets , its like you are in a spaceship.
I love going there then, and because the show is free "for kids" like me I found myself hanging around there everyday .

And then , I grew up and forget about it , dont like astronomy anymore..
But when a friend told me that he loves astronomy...I have second thoughts and found myself again hooked again!
Its not about him .. but its the "desire" thats been sleeping and dormant in the back of my mind and in my heart, which through him...it awakens again.

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Jean
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"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einsteiin

A series of paintings by Chesley Bonestell that appeared in Collier's and Life magazines did it for me. The Collier's articles also got me hooked on space exploration. They were written by some guy with an evil stare named von Braun.

I then started fooling around with war surplus lenses from a place called Edmund Scientific. Later I followed the mike alexander route and ground 4.25" and 8" mirrors for my scopes. Still have them.


Welcome to the BAUT BB, Liev! Read the FAQs and have fun!

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Mine started with a childhood view of the night sky over a lake in a remote area of central Florida in August, 1957. The Milky Way and Comet Mrkos made a stupendous spectacle. That was before the area became light-polluted by sloppy outdoor lighting.

I still have that original mirror, too, although in one of our many moves the moving company somehow lost my scope tube. I even have a couple of ounces of silver nitrate left over from the last silvering I did. Which was probably around 1978. For years that disk has been sitting there, daring me to see what kind of a job I did as a teenager.

Let's see... silver nitrate, ammonia, potassium hydroxide, glucose...

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I have always been hooked on Astronomy for as long as i can remember. By age 7 i had charted out and memorized all 88 constellations.

There is something about the stars...

Constant, they seem to always uplift when you look up- to inspire...

Many years ago, I was homeless. I lived behind a soda machine for nine months. I was ashamed that i had fallen so low. And i never begged or scammed people. I stayed clean and shaven, and i worked Day Labor.
The trouble was that i had to walk job to job and oftentimes i was walking well into the night after leaving a job...

And above me- the stars.
One night looking up, I started thinking about how during my lifetime, ii would see very little movement if any movement amoung them. I thought about how they are moving and on paths. Then I thought about how if on a collision course- a star cannot "move out of harms way"

I can.

It really made a difference on my outlook at the time. No matter how hard things get- I am more powerful than the Stars in the Sky. Because I can Change My Path.

Some of my early experiences with astronomy:

1) When I was 10 or 11, my grandfather would take me outside at his hobby farm in the outskirts of the outskirts of a village called Green River. At the very bottom of a valley, in the yard below his house surrounded by an orchard. You wanted dark skies in the East? He had 'em.

Of course, we'd had a campfire lit (oh well, I didn't know better) so the viewing wasn't optimal, but it was still excellent. We'd lie fully reclined on our lawn chairs in the mid-summer, and he'd point out constellations, and satellites going by. He'd taught me how to find polaris, and what that meant.

He also pointed out the milky way, but I didn't understand what he'd meant, I kept looking for something small rather than taking up such a big part of the whole sky above us. He was pointing out the "forest", I was looking for a "tree".

I'd been looking up ever since, though never (yet) through a scope.

2) Later, my folks had moved me to the area where I'm living now. This was before the locals totally ruined the viewing with over-the-top excessive and completely unshielded lighting (which is rather impressive for a city of well under 10,000 people.) Makes me glad I'm rural now (relatively speaking), even though my neighbors all seem to think they need night-lights in their yards.

I saw my first and only aurorae (in the plural, one summer's worth of faint green glows rippling across the sky like the shallow bank of a river) on the darkened back porch of my folks' house. (Big ol' maple trees are for more than just maple syrup, after all). I'd never seen any before, never saw them again.

Another event from my backyard: we were watching the Canada Day fireworks being launched from the parking lot of what would become my high school, across the valley. While waiting for the show to start, I'd slowly realized that the curious red star I was looking at wasn't a star at all. I'd met Mars on Canada Day.

Later that summer, I met Venus and Jupiter. I met Saturn a few years later.

3) All during that time of my life, I'd been encouraged to "Keep looking up!" by a certain Star Gazer (ne' Star Hustler) whose show I'd catch in rebroadcast on PBS (I think?) in the mornings (I think?) before I had to start getting ready for school.

After a couple of years, either his show got moved or we lost PBS. I never managed to catch his show again. I thought it'd been cancelled. I never realized he was still out there all this time.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Well, it was about 40 years ago... on a Saturday morning. I remember it well, I had my bowl of cereal and sat down and began watching.

"Meet George Jetson... his boy Elroy..."

I was hooked. Then Apollo soon after.

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Scienara: A rejection of reason and evidence.

In order to escape the massive clouds of enemy nanobots, which left our home system, the star you call Tau Ceti, and, many centuries later, arrived at the star you call Alpha Centauri. We used to be part organic/part nano, however, the centuries in space has changed us. We are now 100% nano and we live in stations that orbits just being the primary asteroid belt orbiting Alpha Centauri A. Since the "W" star in the constellation, which you call Cassiopeia started to emit massive amounts of radio waves, some of us have come here. So yeah, being in space makes one kind of interested in astronomy*.


I can remember drawing forested on Uranus and oceans on Neptune ever since I was six.

Then I move to a part of the city were you could see stars and that was it.






*May not be true.

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Fields of Space

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

I was the summer before fifth grade, and I went on my first camping trip with my uncle, who was a wrangler on a ranch in Colorado. The ranch is remotely located, and after the fire died down and we nested in our sleeping bags, I recall noticing the absolute brilliance of the night sky in the clear, cool, high-altitude sky. Having grown up in humid, sea-level SouthEast US, I'd never seen that many stars before in my life!

I think I watched the night sky for about an hour before I fell asleep. After that, every time I saw an article in National Geographic, Popular Science, Scientific American, or on TV (NOVA) having to do with astronomy, I'd always perk up and pay attention.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. A human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

I've always had an on and off sort of interest in astronomy, in the sense that I've always loved anything scientific. I could always remember the orbits and average temperatures of the planets, how far away certain stars and nebulae were, and other stuff like that. But I didn't really appreciate it until I was 19.

I had a girlfriend whom I'd been dating for just over three months, and I'd fallen hard for her, and the Leonid meteor showers were supposed to peak spectacularly the coming weekend (they did). Seeing an opportunity, I suggested we drive out of town a ways and watch them. Curiously, what I really remember about that night is thinking about meteors, and why they glow this or that colour, and what they might be made of, and what angle that one would need to cross my field of vision like that, and how directly one of those things would need to hit to not skip off the atmosphere, and....

So, yeah. Ever since, I've been hooked.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

I came into astronomy relatively late. Science and math were always my things. I knew I would major in some sort of science or engineering, and I ended up in physics. The summer after my sophomore year I did what many other physics majors do--took a summer research position.

It was with one of my professors, and I was designing current-carrying coils for a photodetachment experiment. A couple other students in the program were doing research in astronomy--one on Mars, another on galaxies. I was much more interested in what they were doing than I was in my research! So I went back to school that fall with a new focus: astronomy. And here I am!

I think I was born this way! I honestly cannot remember a time when I was not fascinated with all aspects of science, but astronomy has always been my first love. I got my first telescope when I was six!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Id would have to say it started when I was 7 years old, my Father bought me a 60mm refractor and, he taught me how to use it.

He explained to me that every time I looked up in the sky, I was looking backwards in time, and he explained why, that realization fascinated me, ever since then, I have always been interested in astronomy, that was 43 years ago.

Dennis