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When I was eight or nine years old, I was watching a news program on our black-and-white TV. Wernher von Braun and several other panelists were answering questions from the press about the new Explorer I spacecraft. The question asked was, "How long does it take the satellite to orbit the Earth?" No one knew the answer, so von Braun asked if anyone had a slide rule.
Getting one, he responded, "Ask a few more questions and I will have the answer." He slid the rule back and forth, wrote some notes, and then repeated the process several times. After the second question, he said that he had the answer. Looking at the slide rule, he said that the orbit time was 90.43 minutes. I was so impressed that from then on, I wanted to be someone who could answer seemingly simple questions asked by the public. Many, many years later that is still my motivation as an amateur astronomer .
While I was doing a John Dobson sidewalk astronomy activity in San Francisco with members of his group, the SF Fire Department answered a false alarm around the corner from our sidewalk location. As they were returning, one of the trucks stopped in the middle of the street and the driver asked what we were you doing. "Looking at Saturn," I said, "Do you want to look?" He left the truck, crossed the street, took a look and said "Wow!" He returned to the truck and called all the units back to the scene. About five fire trucks came and all the men looked through our telescopes. Months later I was retelling the story, and one person, a SF firefighter and an amateur astronomer friend of mine, said, "Oh my goodness, I have heard the other side of this story about five times at the fire house and had no idea who the amateur astronomers were." Now my friend knew the rest of the story.
I wanted to be an astronomer at the age of eight.
My introduction to astronomy is still engrained in my mind. When I was four, standing with my father in the backyard, I saw a very large bolide meteor move slowly across the sky. Many years later I had a second experience with a meteor. I was driving across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, when I saw a meteor streak cross the sky in front of me. Then there was a white flash, then complete darkness as the meteor had crashed into the desert. Since then I have
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submitted meteor counts, participated in some AAVSO projects, and in college several of us created a planetarium show that was published.
While I was at Yosemite's Glacier Point, doing solar observing with a friend's 12-inch Meade telescope with a hydrogen-alpha device, my friend decided, at about noon, to turn the scope to Venus. I stood behind the telescope and found Venus unaided-eye. I moved over so that Venus lined up well with a tree and pointed it out to a passerby.
Within minutes, the directions for finding Venus were being given in about five different languages, and I only knew English. With a little prodding every now and then, this went on all afternoon. The reward of that experience in that very special place is still awesome.
I have learned over many years that I do not do astronomy, I love astronomy!
For the last three years, I have been showing the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) slides to many audiences. I start my presentation of the photos showing The Pillars (M16) -- first showing a slide of the view through a 10-inch telescope, then viewing David Malin's photo taken on a 153-inch telescope, and finally revealing the famous HST image. The reaction is "WOW!"
Then we discuss the distances in the HST image and the reaction is again "WOW!" A similar sequence for the HST image of the Helix Planetary Nebula produces the same results.
My entire motivation is "explaining the universe to the public." Project ASTRO, star parties, writing articles for club bulletins, editing a club bulletin, serving as president of an area-wide astronomy organization, membership and participation in many astronomy clubs, and telescope making are just a few of the ways that I accomplish this. Going where the public is -- to observe and to explain astronomy to people who don't have the foggiest idea of what it is -- is exciting to me.
I wanted a science hobby I could participate in, and some classes by John Dobson got me started with public science. That's Science with a very large S!
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