[UPDATE: Submit an audio version of your story for a podcast. See this blog post ]
How did I get into astronomy? I was born in 1981 so my formative years were the late 80s and early 90s. I am an astronomer forged from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Hubble Space Telescope and of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. I would say that those were the things that got me into astronomy? What got you into astronomy? I’d be interested to know. In the spirit of sharing, here’s my story.
I always liked space, most kids do. I had a litle Osborne book called ‘Space Facts’ (or something) which was filled with child-sized facts perfect for memorising. It was probably given to me to shut me up, as I was a ‘why?’ child. I can still picture some of the illustrations that helped me learn all about space. Saturn sitting in a giant bucket is one I can vividly recall.
I got a telescope when I was 11. It was a small, wobbly refractor that I used to look at Jupiter’s moons and the Orion Nebula. Around the same time we had our loft converted at home. Thus the first bedroom that I didn’t have to share with my brother was south-facing and had a large, retractable skylight that was just right for looking out at the Moon and planets. Suddenly I was obsessed.
A couple of years later, with the recent repair of Hubble firmly in my mind, I got my first real telescope. It was a 114mm Newtonian refractor and it was heavy! It was bulky and obtrusive in my sloped-roofed bedroom but it worked like a charm. I had to teach myself about Right-Ascension and Declination, the rotation of the Earth under a ‘celestial sphere’. I taught myself about the life-cycle of stars, with Orion and Patrick Moore’s ‘Atlas of the Universe’ as my guide.
I was hooked on the TV coverage of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it impacted Jupiter and it propelled me into learning about comets, asteroids and the origins of the Solar System.
In the late 90s we got an Internet connection and that changed everything! I began programming and coding little Visual Basic programs that would rotate little solar systems on the screen. I could grab images and information via our CompuServe browser and use Mosaic to see the latest images from NASA. It was very exciting.
University soon loomed over the horizon and I was amazed to see that Astrophysics was an option – the rest is probably self-evident. I’m now trying to wrap up my PhD and create a thesis from the papers I’ve written. I have now been to a professional telescope and taken real, original data.
I have just seen astronauts repair Hubble for the final time, almost 20 years after it was first launched. Yesterday the first British astronaut was selected by ESA. A whole group of European astronauts was revealed after a lengthy selection process. I assume (or perhaps hope) that there are legions of 10 year old children around Europe watching this and thinking ‘I want to do that’. Because for what seems to me like the first time: they really could!
I hope that you have heard of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, which I play a small part in organising. As part of this I am creating an episode about how people get into astronomy. If you would like to share your story then please leave a comment explaining how you got into astronomy.
Make sure you use your correct email so I can contact you (emails not published here). I’ll be blogging about this upcoming podcast episode again, but since I was sharing I thought you might like to as well.
[Image from Flickr user turbojoe used under CC]
I have been interested in astronomy my whole life it feels like, but my earliest astronomy memory, and one I can only conclude was a seminal one, was when I was about 5 years old. My Dad, in Indiana, took me outside late at night (late for me, anyway), to see a lunar eclipse. I had never heard of such a thing before, and I was absolutely astounded to think of a bright full moon going dark like that. Despite some clouds (and mosquitoes, must have been in the summer), we persevered and I saw my first ever celestial event. It’s because of this, and other events in my childhood, that I think early childhood experiences are important for fostering an interest in science in children.
My path is pretty similar to yours: born the same year, remember Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the HST. I had the Usbourne Book of Space Facts (still got it somewhere) with a picture of Saturn floating in a bathtub! Got my first scope at 7: a 40mm Russian refractor. Great for bird spotting, but not so good for astronomy. I still have that, too. I covered my walls in astronomy posters and had a solar system (made from Christmas tree ornaments) hanging from my ceiling. I still have glow-in-the-dark stars on my wall.
I got a 2.5-inch Tal newtonian when I was 11. I spent many happy nights with my Mum and that scope up in the hills near where we lived. I couldn’t see much out of my windows with it as they didn’t open very far, so for my GCSE design project I built a wooden box with movable shelves so I could raise and lower it. I joined the local astronomical society in 1994 (I think) where I met some very interesting speakers over the years. Ten years later, I was being asked to give talks too! Eventually I went off to Uni and studied physics, going on to do a PhD in radio astronomy before escaping overseas.
Now I’m lucky enough to get paid to do something I love, and the best bit is that I get to share my enthusiasm with kids of all ages. This year is a great opportunity to do that (not that I need an excuse), and all the big events over the past week are great for inspiring kids. Thing is though, I don’t actually know what first sparked my interest. I know I was interested by the age of five, but no one seems to know just what it was that started it all! Why did I pursue it this far? Sheer stubbornness I guess!
Started early (4 or 5 years old) and most years thereafter by lying on my back at night, in Arizona, and merging with the Milky Way. All of this went away when we moved out of the wild lands(Prescott) to big cities. Regardless, those nights and those visions are with me forever. Astronomy today is, for me, just the process of getting re-acquainted.
its kind of a long story: http://amandabauer.blogspot.com/2009/03/extended-history-of-astropixie.html
I don’t remember the event, but I was about 3. We were living in Malta at the time as dad was stationed there in the RAF. We had gone to the beach and mum tried to get me to look at the full moon, apparently huge in the sky, but I couldn’t see it. They promptly got me glasses!
Mum was always fascinated by the sky, and loved to watch the sky, but I knew the things she was telling me were “folk tales”, and not true. She still has a hard time remembering that we go around the sun. We moved to Canada in 1963, the flight over the Atlantic was at night, it was great. Much to everyone’s dismay I didn’t sleep, I was glued to the window looking at the sky.
I remember watching the eclipse from my aunts front door while they hid in the basement. I wasn’t allowed to go out, for fear of “what could happen to me”… yea, they were really into “folk tales”!
I got a book for Christmas that year, a “fun facts” about space. And the real fun began. I started reading, and I watched everything I could on TV. Even spending nights at relatives when our TV wasn’t working. I remember the Moon landing, and still have a newspaper with the front page articles. I remember being so frustrated when things were happening that weren’t on TV, or that happened during school hours.
When I met the man of my dreams, while still in High School, I was happy to discover that he had a passion much deeper than mine, so my learning grew as he shared things with me. We would sit on the edge of the road for hours at night, looking up. We married, and when we were decorating our apartment we got wallpaper from the Simpsons-Sears catalogue that is a full wall mural of a moon-scape with Earth hanging over it. I know it is a composite, I’ve seen the pictures separately, and there are little white “stars” dabbed about the blackness, it isn’t “for real” but I love it. When the shuttles started, we cut out a picture and stuck it to the wall, same with the Hubble. It is still my livingroom wall. Friends used to call the apartment “Space Station G100″. When Toronto had the Planetarium we went a few times.
One event I remember was attending a friend’s wedding in Pembroke Ontario. It was the furthest north I had ever been. We left the bustling town (!) and went to her grandmother’s cottage a few miles away… even further away from lights… after a drink or two I went out to “catch some air”, took a few steps, went around a big tree, and looked up. I was stunned. The sky was full of stars. It was mesmerizing. I felt it was almost too much. A few minutes later I heard bustling at the cottage and so went to see what the problem was. Turned out it was me! Apparently I had been outside for over an hour and they were worried that I had fallen into the Ottawa River. I honestly thought it had been moments… I was so star-struck!
That’s it. No formal training, and only work after High School. Just a determination to understand what I was really looking at. I try hard to teach mum, but she just finds the basics, like orbits, so hard to comprehend. (why is Venus sometimes a morning star, and sometime an evening star… been working on that one for years!)
At parties I am known to have everyone out on the balcony to see the ISS. So cool to be able to tell them exactly where and when, and it happens.
I just love the connection we now have with NASA and ESA, and all the professionals that are willing to share with the common folk… kids these days have it so easy.
I hope to one day read all the books I have about astronomy and physics, I’ve gotten through over half of them so far. I will succeed. I have no TV, and so my entertainment is the computer, books, and the night sky. I love it.
Melanie
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I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.
I’m not a professional astronomer (I have just an elderly 6″ reflector), so I don’t qualify for the podcast, but I’ll’ toss this in anyway. I got seriously interested in spaceflight via media exposure, starting with the 1950 movie Destination Moon. The interest that was sparked before I was 10 years old lasted long enough for me to have worked on the Apollo Command Module control system before I left aerospace.
(You may now return to stories from real astronomers.)
I was hooked by “The Universe,” part of the Time-Life Nature series, though I couldn’t understand it much, and by today’s standards the images seem tame. It was the powers-of-ten scale to cosmology, understanding, somewhat, Hubble and Kant’s “Realm of the Nebula, and galactic scales grabbed my seven-year-old imagination; at the same time watching every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo mission from start to finish.
Like so many others, however, it was that first time I brought Saturn and it’s rings into focus through a Tasco telescope, that got me hooked.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, thanks to Picard, Data and La Forge I got hooked to everything related to physics and astronomy. I majored in Engineering for the love of all the technical stuff I saw in the show and in the hope I would get a little bit closer to the lovely tech world I was introduced to. Since then I have always been looking to the skies with wonder, I recently bought a Galileoscope (waiting for it to be shipped), looking forward to using it since in my country, no telescopes are sold. Thanks for the Galileoscope initiative, you guys are all great. I hope myself to spark interest in Astronomy to all my younger cousins through my Galileoscope. My only wish is to have a larger telescope, unfortunately, this will always be impossible due to its unavailability in my country and no international shipping options
Like RBH, I am an amateur, but the reason is slightly – different. Around Winter 1963, as a 16 yr old and Secretary of the Photography Club at my school, I and a group of others went on a tour of the University of London Observatory nearby. Night was a crisp, clear, dry one, a rarity yet peculiarly British. My memories from that far back are vague but I do remember gaping at the enormous Radcliffe 24″ refractor, and admiring the Victorian Fry 8″. Admired it so much that somehow I and my two best friends got separated from the rest and were left in the 8″ dome, open, ’scope wound up (Victorian, remember, clockwork drive) and cover removed. And Jupiter was up. We were transfixed for several hours. I will never forget how large Jupiter was, hanging nearly filling the field of view, nearly blinding in its brilliance.
So of course the amateur scopes available to me from then on were in no way satisfactory. Until 1994 when I got my Celestron GP-C8. Not a scratch on the Fry’s imaging capabilities, but pretty good. Plus I got involved in finishing the construction of the 24″ Newtonian in our local Bainbridge Island BPAA Observatory – see http://www.bpastro.org
FYI, the ULO is at http://www.ulo.ucl.ac.uk/telescopes/index.html
Thanks so much for the stories guys. I’m not specifically after professionals by any means – I’m keen to know how anyone at all got into astronomy.
I have been interested in astronomy my whole life it feels like, but my earliest astronomy memory, and one I can only conclude was a seminal one, was when I was about 5 years old. My Dad, in Indiana, took me outside late at night (late for me, anyway), to see a lunar eclipse. I had never heard of such a thing before, and I was absolutely astounded to think of a bright full moon going dark like that. Despite some clouds (and mosquitoes, must have been in the summer), we persevered and I saw my first ever celestial event. It’s because of this, and other events in my childhood, that I think early childhood experiences are important for fostering an interest in science in children.
I’ve been watching Futurama since it first aired in 1999 (excellent show :] ) and it really did get me into astronomy haha and now I’m indulged into astronomy then I have EVER been.
It was interesting to browse trough
keep up the good work and thanks for sharing.
If you’d like to contribute an audio version of how you got into astronomy, for a podcast, see http://orbitingfrog.com/blog/2009/07/06/tell-me-a-story/
I have just been facinated by astronomy since as long as I can remember. I just think its the coolest thing! in some ways earth may be a tiny bit better than space, but 99.9% of the time space is better in my Eyes, and by the way if any of you guys interested in space and stars travel a lot, definitly go to Arizona, U.S.A.! you would not believe the night sky there like around the grand canyon OMG! there was no place in the sky where there wasn’t a star!
A couple of years ago, I conducted a survey profiling the members of Cardiff Astronomical Society – around 300.
I concluded that, with very few exceptions, the enduring interest in astronomy was begun when they were between 9 and 14 years old. Often this was triggered by a memorable event – eclipse, comet, meteor shower, moon walk, space mission – or just a holiday on a farm with very dark skies. I also found out that the professional astronomers who gave talks at our IYA festival this summer fell into this 5 year window. It was the just right time of life for an interest to become a hobby and then via study to a career. I began with Sputnik and Dan Dare – you do the maths ! I had a hard decision to make at age 14. I have been a professional musician for my working life and have recently returned to astronomy having recently retired from lecturing. A bit like many having piano lessons as a child and then later – after career, the family – getting back to playing again. So I found that for many of our members astronomy had lain dormant as an interest, only to reemerge in later life. It never leaves you !
This IYA year we have put on many events for the general public and it is very rare to find someone who doesn’t have some astro experiences to share, a question to ask or a latent curiosity.