Telescope Memories

My telescope memories are all aligned with my husband: he’s the one that had a telescope from his early teenage years onward. By the time I met him in the early 70s, he had an 8 in reflector with a mount that was mostly cast iron. It was a team effort to assemble the mount because it was so heavy! I vividly remember a night during the summer before we got married when  we took the telescope out to the astronomy club’s observing site to observe a lunar eclipse. We discovered when we got back that my mother had gone out to see if there really was a lunar eclipse….that it wasn’t just an excuse we’d concocted for a late night date!

Now - over 40 years later - the telescopes have improved significantly. My husband has a new one with much more sophisticated electronics and a lighter weight mount. He set it up on our deck. There is too much light for the deck to ever be a prime observing spot and it was a marginal night weather wise…veils of clouds kept rolling by….but it was good enough for him to check out the equipment. Everything worked. I took a picture of the moon by aligning my camera to the eyepiece of the telescope!

So - it seem that both my husband and I are reverting to some hobbies we put aside when we were crunched for time during a peak career years…..me to my microscope and him to his telescope.