Have you ever looked up into the night sky and said "I think I see Uranus!" Probably not since Uranus is not a naked eye planet, but with the right telescope you can see it and a bunch of other cool stuff too! I know because I have seen some of them and constantly marvel at the immense vastness of space and the things that "live" there.
I vaguely recall my father building a small telescope when we were young but I don’t remember him using it much. It could be that we were always in bed when he did, but I doubt it. It was an aluminum tube with a home-made eyepiece and a 4.5 inch mirror. No mount of any kind so it wasn’t very usable. When my brother and I were teens, we painted the tube white and built a kludgy wooden platform that was also less than useful. That telescope gathered a lot of dust over the years.
Through the years I learned about some of the big stuff in the night sky like the constellations Orion and the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), but I really could not point out much else. I still would look up on a dark night and wonder what was out there.
After my dad died in 1991, I grabbed the scope, carted it from house to house through some moves, but never used it. I started getting more interested astronomy when the comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter in 1994, and even more so in 1995 when comet Hale-Bopp could be easily seen in the night sky. At that time I got out my binoculars to look at Hale-Bopp, but also was amazed to see lots of other cool stuff out there. I didn’t know what any of it was, but that didn’t stop me from looking! It did however prompt me to investigate what I was looking at.
The first thing I noticed in the binoculars was a group of stars that looked like the Big Dipper, but much closer together. The internet was cranking up at this point so I started looking online for what it could be. I figured out that I was looking at an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus named “The Pleiades”, or M45, or “The Seven Sisters”, or Subaru! One thing that had all those names? I was fascinated! One name I couldn’t pronounce, one sounded like a highway in Michigan, and the one was a make of Japanese car. That last one was kind of neat because you can see the stars on the Subaru logo. Well now I just had to see what else I could find.
As I continued to advance my knowledge of the heavens, I “discovered” some inexpensive tools that make finding and identifying things much simpler. One is a planisphere, and the other is a planetarium program for the computer. The planisphere is very simple to use and can graphically show you what the sky looks like at any time, except for things that move like planets. That is where the planetarium program comes in handy. It will show you where to look to see the planets, Moon, and Sun. If you need to know where to look to see the Sun you most likely will have a difficult time finding the other things, but sometimes it’s helpful to see where other things are relative to the Sun.
Well, now that I was finding stuff to look at in the night sky, I really wanted to be able to use the telescope that I had laying around so I tried using it and could not easily point it where I wanted it to point so I started doing some more research. I found that a man named Dobson had designed a simple mount that anyone with simple wood working skills could make. I looked at the design online and made one for myself. Now it was a snap to point and look. This started my quest to view deep space objects. Through my research I found that the “M” in M45 stood for Messier, a French astronomer that in the late 1700’s cataloged 103 objects in the night skies. These are some of the best “targets” for amateur astronomers to find and see.
I started working through the list to see if I could find them also. Some are relatively easy to see like M42, the Orion Nebula and as discussed before, M45. Others are more challenging and require a nice dark night away from city lights. There was the challenge. How do you get away from the lights? How far away do you need to be? More research provided answers. From Grand Rapids you need to go north to at least Newaygo before the city lights are no longer a factor. That’s about 30 miles from the city, which makes spontaneous star gazing really difficult. I found that I don’t live in a location that is that great for astronomy. We have a lot of cloud cover, 96 days of partly cloudy and 205 days of cloudy as measured by NOAA, and dark comes late in these high latitudes during summer. During the winter it’s darn cold which can really make your night short if you’re a wimp like me.
I was lucky enough to receive a new Celestron telescope that had a variety of eyepieces. The different eyepieces allow you to change the magnification of the object that you are looking at so this was really cool. Looking at the moon or planets was a lot more fun now that I could “zoom in” and see them larger. I started doing some photography at this point and was amazed at what I was able to do even with cheap equipment. The field of astrophotography continues to expand by leaps and bounds all the time. The capabilities go up and the prices come down. It’s amazing what some amateurs are doing.
I think things are more fun if you have other people that share your passion, so I thought I’d see if there were any folks at church that were interested in meeting. There were a number of people that were interested, but not many that had any knowledge so I figured we would all learn together. It was then that I started the Kentwood Amateur Astronomy League or KAAL for short. John and Chris de Longpre were really helpful at that time being both knowledgeable and willing participants in the little venture. John hosted the KAAL.org web site that I built and they both shared their experiences chasing Solar eclipses.
KAAL had meetings and even a Star Party where you all go out to a site, set up telescopes, and help each other look at things. We also had meetings where we learned about different aspects of astronomy or an astronomical object, and just had fun discussing the field. Unfortunately as with many things, KAAL did not last more that a couple of years. Currently the web site is still there, but that is all that’s left.
As for me, I still am fascinated by the night sky, but found that I don’t have what it takes to be much of an astronomer. I can’t stay up much past 10 or 11pm any more because I work days, and I live in Michigan which is hardly the Mecca for astronomers. I would love to spend more time observing the sky, but this is one of those things that has been lowered in priority at this time in my life. Maybe I will pick it back up at some point, but even if I don’t, it has been great fun and a wonderful learning experience.
Clear Skies!