CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: Greybeard develops perspective

It seems to me that there must be some better place on Cloudy Nights to have this discussion. One of the advantages of Cloudy Nights w.r.t. the old sci.astro.amateur forum is its division into specialty groups, but the flip side is that there's nowhere for general discussions. The Beginner's Forum might be closest.

Anyway, I would never divide things up like this. In particular, gadget-lovers and scientists seem more like polar opposites than things that should be lumped together. Scientists are interested in things outside of them, while gadget lovers are interested in their own posessions.

Moreover, naturalists are, by definition, scientists. In art, the "naturalist" school is the one that pays attention to what plants and mountains *really* look like, as opposed to some idealized or romanticized version.

Botanists and biochemists are both scientists who study plants, but botanists are certainly naturalists, and biochemists maybe not.

I definitely consider myself a naturalist where astronomy is concerned, and that has both an aesthetic and a scientific aspect.

Here's a piece I wrote on this subject long ago for sci.astro.amateur. I keep plannning to re-work it into printable form, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

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A Taxonomy of Amateur Astronomers
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Amateur astronomers can be divided into four categories: Space Cadets, Peeping Toms, Star Huggers, and Wonks. Actually, all of us probably fall into at least two of these categories, and many of us fit all of them. How do I know? Because all four live inside me.

Space Cadets
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When I was a child, I was smart, bookish, unathletic, and weaker than all of my clasmates. Or so it seemed at the time. Looking back on it now, I suspect that I wasn't quite the wimp that I thought I was, but it is the perception that counts. Perhaps all boys feel that way;
after all, all boys are weaker than their fathers.

Since there seemed to be no hope of my getting big and strong in the immediate future, I took refuge in fantasies of potency. I loved all things big and powerful, and what could be bigger or more powerful than the vastness of the universe? In an earlier era, I might have dreamt of sailing the high seas and conquering people with black or brown skins, but I was a child of Sputnik, so I dreamt of conquering outer space.

Long before I became a man, I realized that science fiction is no more a sober depiction of the future than sword-and-sorcery fantasy is a sober depiction of the past. Conquest of the planets, if it happens at all, will not be achieved by lone heroes riding on white chargers, but by huge, faceless, industrial bureaucracies. Still, realistic
or not, outer space -- the ultimate escape -- remains tremendously compelling. As soon as Galileo turned his telescope to the skies, centuries before space flight became a reality, people dreamt of treading on foreign worlds. Surely that is a large part of the reason that the planets fascinate both novices and initiates; we see them, and we imagine ourselves there.

Peeping Toms
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Technology is the obvious refuge of people who are smart, bookish, and weak. Since I could not run or fight as well as my classmates, I used to design guns, robots, space ships, and other things fast or strong. However, my attempts to build these things got nowhere, for obvious
reasons. I would have been happy to buy them, but my parents would have frowned on guns, and robots and space ships were conspicuously absent from my catalogs.

But those who cannnot do can always look. I cultivated skills of seeing and listening that continue to serve me well, even now when my insecurities of potence are just a remote memory. And I lusted after the technology of seeing, which unlike the technology of doing, was well within my grasp: magnifying glasses, microscopes, cameras,
binoculars, and telescopes. I cannot posess the planets, the stars, and the galaxies, but I can undress them with my eyes.

Is it just a coincidence, a huge joke of nature, or is it an unconscious bias of their designers that makes telescopes so strikingly phallic? Isn't this part of the esthetic appeal of refractors as opposed to more
functional designs like the short-focus truss-tube reflector on Mount Palomar? No matter. Our eyes are our most powerful organs, and no tool is more powerful than a telescope. Without noise, sweat, or fuss, it brings the unreachable within our grasp.

Just as the smart and weak are drawn to the effortless, ethereal magic of computers, so are we drawn to the magic of telescopes. But telescopes are better than computers, because computers are doomed to be a world apart; the world inside a computer is different in kind from the real physical world. Telescopes, by contrast, connect us directly to the great powers and forces of the universe.

Star Huggers
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At the opposite pole from the technocrat is the nature lover. Or is it really opposite? The two are flip sides of the same coin. Before the Industrial Revolution, there were no nature lovers; nature was just there, unremarkable, taken for granted.

I had the good fortune to spend three quarters of my childhood in the city and one quarter in the country. Unfortunately (from the point of view of astronomy) that one quarter was the summer, and for most of the summer, I went to bed before the stars came out. Even so, I managed to catch some glimpses of the real night sky, the night
sky as it was meant to be, the night sky as it was seen by every poet, farmer, and city dweller before the invention of artificial lighting. And one glimpse is enough to hook you.

It is not just modern romanticism that sees magic in the starry night. That sight has been a mainstay of literature since the very beginning; it is inherently wondrous. The heavens proclaim the glory of God.

The space cadet wants to conquer, to trample the stars underfoot. We may not have done that, but we have done second best; we have blotted them out with electric lights, so that they cannot taunt us with their transcendance.

The star hugger wants to be conquered, to lie on his back under the starry sky and abandon his soul, to merge with the universe.

Alas, the universe is not privy to the bargain. It goes on its way without taking heed of us mortals. Stars are, in fact, huge balls of fiery gas, and not especially huggable.

Wonks
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It is knowledge that squares the circle. Or, to use a more precise metaphor, knowledge teaches us that a square and a circle are incommensurable, but they can dance ever closer. Likewise, we cannot conquer the stars, nor can we join with them in mystical union, but we can dance with them through knowledge.

Learning comes in many different forms. The first steps are identification, classification, and naming. We walk in the woods and we identify a plant. Then we classify it; we say that it is like some other plants nearby, or other plants that we have seen before. Then, to fix the classification in our minds, as we fix a photographic image on paper, we give it a name -- we call it jewelweed. And by giving it a name, not only do we make it possible to study it, we also make it possible to share our learning with other people. It all sounds incredibly traightforward, but as any botanist can tell you, it is anything but.

Until the telescope, and better, the spectroscope, were invented, we were stuck classifying stars by their apparent locations and brightness. Hence the vast amount of effort that the ancients put into configuring and naming the constellations and the stars.

After classification come dissection and analysis; we want to find out what things look like inside, and how they work. Astronomy is unique among the sciences in the fact that its subjects cannot be manipulated. If you want to find out how a cell works, you cut it open, or put it into a different environment. Neither trick is possible with a star. That is part of what makes astronomy so uniquely attractive to an amateur. The manipulatory sciences demand ever more powerful and expensive tools, like giant atom smashers, which are completely out of the reach of amateurs. The gap is smaller in astronomy. A variable-star observer with binoculars can make valuable research contributions; a humble 8-inch SCT with a CCD camera is capable of original discoveries.

No matter how fancy their equipment, all amateurs are doomed to acquire almost all of their knowledge through book-learning, not through direct experience. Of course, this is true in all fields, and it is true of professionals as well as amateurs. No individual investigator, however skilled or lucky, can begin to match the cumulative collective knowledge of humanity.

But I, for one, find book-learning in isolation to be a little dry and sterile. I like to be able to see the things that I am learning about; I like a framework on which to hang my book-learning. And here, again, amateur astronomers are incredibly lucky. Nobody will ever see an atom or an electron, but most of the subjects of astronomy are sitting out there in plain view, just waiting for someone to admire them and learn about them.

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Tony Flanders

First and foremost observing love: naked eye.
Second, binoculars.
Last but not least, telescopes.
And I sometimes dabble with cameras.