The secret to enjoying astronomy

Is there a secret to enjoying amateur astronomy?

Is it all about buying the right telescope or maybe a buying astronomical binoculars? Is it all about getting the right telescope accessories? Maybe it’s getting the right astronomy book or the latest astronomy software. Maybe …

All those things do help, no doubt about it, but the secret of enjoying amateur astronomy is not about telescopes, binocular or telescope accessories; it’s all about perspective. Think of it this way. How many people, even in our high tech ultramodern society, have ever seen Saturn and its rings? No, I’m not talking about seeing a picture of Saturn in a magazine or a book or seeing Saturn on TV or an astronomy video. I’m talking about seeing Saturn, firsthand and personally, with their own eye, through a telescope. The answer? Only a very small percentage of our population can claim they actually saw Saturn and its rings, rather than a picture of Saturn and its rings. To be sure, when we amateurs look at Saturn through a telescope, it does not match up with the splendor of those pictures, but bragging rights go to those who actually saw Saturn for themselves. When you simply look at a picture, you never go beyond spectator status; when you search with your telescope and find Saturn and then see it in the eyepiece of your telescope, you cross the line from spectator to explorer. Now, that’s perspective.

Perspective? Nothing exemplifies perspective like seeing galaxies through a telescope. Most galaxies in a telescope appear as fairly dim glows or grey smudges – not much detail can be seen in even a large amateur telescope. Visually, they lag far, far behind pictures you see in a book or magazine. So why do so many amateur astronomers love to look at galaxies? You guessed it – perspective. When you realize that the smudge in your eyepiece is really its own universe, containing many billions of stars, your imagination soars. Is there intelligent life in that galaxy? Is their some intelligent being look back at out galaxy, as we are looking at theirs? Even more incredible is the fact that those galaxies are immensely distant. Even at the speed of light, it takes light many millions of years to deliver that image to the eyepiece in our telescope. What you see in the eyepiece is the galaxy as it was many millions of years, ago. Yes, your telescope is your own personal time machine for looking back into the past.

It' all about perspective.