Universal connection

I am an amateur astronomer. Over the years I have accumulated more telescopes and other astronomy-related equipment than you can shake a stick at. I'm awfully tempted to donate some of it to the local schools, which is I will probably do soon.

Out of all my telescopes, my primary instrument is a research-grade catadioptric telescope on a GPS-capable motorized guiding mount. Looking around the house, it's probably the most expensive piece of equipment around. It also very heavy - I've been growing progressively weaker since I started my treatment for my Condition. When I bought it, I could lift it by myself. Now, I can't. Fortunately, there are usually some very kind gentlemen in my local astronomy club who'd help me get it setup and taken down.

Having a self-guiding motorized mount that auto-calibrates using GPS is very handy. I can put my CCD on the scope and take pretty pictures. Eventually, I may buy a photometer for it to do so photometric measurements. It's handy - I don't have to continually bump it to keep objects in view at high magnification. I also don't need to find it - just scroll down to the thing I want to see and it auto-slews to it.

It's useful. It's handy. But it all seems like cheating somehow.

I started astronomy, really started astronomy down in California with a handy 8" Dobsonian. I learnt the skies by starhopping, as did many generations of astronomers before. There is a certain satisfaction in navigating the bejewelled vaults of heaven to find the glittering object older than Earth itself nicely centered in your eyepiece. It's a feeling of accomplishment hard to describe. I think that perhaps commercial pilots might understand, going from flying jetliners on autopilot to the sheer joy of hand-flying a nimble small plane.

There is also the camaraderie amongst amateur astronomers. The rituals of setting up one's scope near but not too near each other. The quiet enjoyment of waiting for night to fall and our scopes to cool. The anticipation that comes from seeing the first star in the darkening sky. The fade from recognizing each other by visual means over to completely audible sounds. The sharing of communial knowledge of the stars, one of the last oral traditions still in effect as each generation of astronomers teaches the next one where the beautiful things are. The smallness and insignificance of our daily troubles when put in perspective of gazing up into the night sky and seeing the Milky Way encircle the heavens like a road of stars. The awe and wonder of seeing objects in the eyepiece whose photons were already whizzing through the ether for countless ages before our own Sun was even formed.

How can you experience all that and not feel connected?

Alas, professional astronomers (as opposed to amateur astronomers) often don't know the night sky. They have computers and technicians to slew their instruments for them. Some of them never even bother going to the observatory - they can just get their electronic data sent to them.

I intend to shift over from my present industry over to astronomy/astrophysics sometime in the next decade or so. I hope I never become so intellectually cold as to forget what it means to be an astronomer, amateur or otherwise.