I reached out to flyboyu777 this month, and asked him about his start and interest in the hobby. Jim had this to share with us for the October restart.
All of us have a moment or two in our young lives that shape our future, including what we enjoy and desire. This is especially true of our hobbies. My love of astronomy and model trains came about when I was a young boy around 9, living in Germany in the late 60’s. The spark for astronomy began with one of the tenants at the apartment complex we lived in at Patch Barracks, near Stuttgart. There was a man with an enormous refractor (probably a 4” Unitron) sharing his telescope with anyone who wanted to take a peek through the eyepiece. I took a look, and to this day I still don’t know what I saw, if anything. But the sight of that magnificent telescope sparked a desire for a telescope for Christmas. The telescope I got was likely a Gilbert 2 1/2” reflector, and I had no idea how to use it, much less how to set it up or collimate the optics! Trying to see anything through it was frustrating, and I quickly lost interest in astronomy for a few years. Back to model trains for the next several years.
It would be around age 12 when the astronomy spark returned. I believe it was Christmas 1972 when I received a Focal brand (K-Mart) 20X 30mm spotting scope, and a few months later I was out one clear night and noticed a fuzzy spot in the sky in the constellation Orion. I thought I had discovered a comet! Of course, it turned out to be M-42, but until I finally got a star chart I had no idea what I was looking at. The bug was back! For those old enough to remember the Sears Wish Book, they came out around August each year and were a source of dreams for boys and girls in the 60’s and 70’s. As I looked through all the toys, I knew what I wanted, and found the pages with the Sears telescopes that were available to order. There was a beautiful 80mm equatorially mounted refractor that was what I wanted and put it at the top of my Christmas list. Unfortunately, my mom informed me shortly before Christmas that they had sold out of that telescope, I needed to pick another one. The only one worth getting was a little Alt-Az mounted 60mm with steel tripod legs. It would have to do. It was several months before I received my little refractor. But when I did, it was beautiful to my 12-year-old eyes! Through those 30-degree FOV eyepieces, I saw the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and many “deep sky” objects, and of course, aperture fever set in! I had to have something bigger so I could see more! As a kid with limited resources, There was no way I could buy a Celestron 8, much less one of the 6 or 8” Edmund reflectors that looked so nice in the catalog. The 3 or 4” refractors were also out of my league. Then I started reading about building a telescope, including grinding, polishing, and testing, so that’s what I did. My next Christmas wish list was to get a mirror-making kit along with a mirror mount, secondary mount, and mirror from Edmund. I even got a couple of the great books they had on optics and mounts, along with a Foucalt Test kit. Instead of starting with a 6” mirror, I went all out with an 8”, since I reasoned that I would get almost double the light-gathering ability to see more fuzzies. For several months I labored away on the mirror, grinding and polishing. To this day I still have flashbacks of walking the barrel to the Eagles' “Lying Eyes” or ELO’s “Evil Woman”! I hogged out the mirror to make an F-7 (+/-) mirror, and while it left a little to be desired as to the final finish and correction, it was good enough to give pretty nice views of Jupiter, Saturn, and deep sky objects. The tube was from a stovepipe extension, the mount was a collection of 3” Pipe fittings, and the counterweight was concrete, formed in a round plastic tub with one of the pipes set in the middle. The telescope was impressive enough that it helped me win the NE Alabama Regional Science Fair in 1978!
Fast forward many years, an Air Force flying career followed by a major airline job, and I finally had the opportunity to build a permanent observatory on my property. At this point, I owned several telescopes, the largest of them a black tube C-14 that came on a CI-700 mount. Of course that mount was undersized for the C-14, so I bought a Losmandy Titan mounted on a custom-made pier. This was in my first observatory, along with a 12’ Meade LX-200.
To this day, the best views I’ve ever had of Jupiter were with the C-14, It was an optical gem. Unfortunately, my personal life went through some monumental changes, so I wound up with no observatory and sold most of my telescopes in my possession at the time, with the exception of an Astrophysics F/9 152 from the late 80s. The picture you see is the only one I have of the observatory. I thought it was a clever design.Several years later as the airline industry recovered from 9-11 and bankruptcy wages, I was in a position to build another observatory in the Texas Hill Country. As I started planning the build, I pretty much went crazy and decided to attach a roll-off roof to an Exploradome II dome. It was a monumental task, and even though I had some help with the build, I would find myself at times anxious, thinking about all the tasks I still had to complete. I finally “completed” the building, and mounted an AG Optical 17” IDK on a Paramount MEII under the dome, along with a custom-made AG Optical 12.5” F/5.5 Newtonian, with carbon fiber tube and Zerodur primary mounted on an iOptron CEM 120 mount.
I was really in business now, or so I thought. COVID-19 came to Texas, and it got pretty ugly at the airline biz-so ugly for me that when I got an early retirement offer, I jumped on it. Unfortunately, that meant that another move was in store, so say goodbye to observatory #2. I sold my Texas house, and moved back to Alabama in 2021, bringing my 17” and 12.5” along with me. Now It’s 2024, another observatory is underway-this time it is a “simple” 12 x 16’ roll-off, with 3 piers for a 14” Meade ACF F/8, a C-11, and a smaller pier for smaller telescopes. I sold the 17” and 12.5” thinking I would never build a big observatory again. Where I live I have OK skies, but the humidity is higher than in Texas, and the number of clear nights is fewer by far. So I’m more in planet mode than deep sky at this point!
A great read Jim,thank you for sharing this about yourself.
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