Spaulding wrote:
Nothing really. I didn't know or forgot the inner core was solid. It's hard to imagine that much pressure or how it acts. What got you into all this?
When I was 4 I saw Carl Sagans Cosmos (the spaceship of imagination...) and I don't know if it was the soothing voice or the beautiful images or the terror of the universe but I was solidly hooked. By 6 I'd graduated from The Talking Bread of Richard Scarry and started reading this 1977 set of encyclopedias my parents had bought. Book 2 of their set had a lot of astronomy stuff and it was just fascinating to me. WYCC sometimes showed astronomy programs and I would watch and rewatch every astronomy episode i found. My dad would leave notes on a napkin when one might be on when he left for work and saw the daily TV show listing in the newspaper each morning. I'd wake up to see them on the kitchen table.
My uncle Ken bought me a 3 inch refractor when I was maybe 8. It was from sears. It was crappy but I caught some cool shit in it.
In high school I had a few AP classes, physics and astronomy. My astronomy teacher was a student of J Allen Hynek while attending northwestern. I took a major interest in the class, asking way too many questions and started a star party group which my teacher sponsored. He, my physics teacher and I build a telescope from Meade mirrors and sonotube, a nice 8 inch newtonian. They did it on their off time summer 1994 on their own time to help me have it ready for the collision of comet Shoemaker Levy 9 and Jupiter. We finished the polishing and alignment the weekend before and the three of us watched the scars of the collision come into view with my newly built telescope. I was very lucky to have dedicated teachers who selflessly helped me develop a passion. Ill never forget them. I still have this telescope today, although my lenses are all broken.
When I was a senior in hs I worked at a store at Woodfield called BareBones. They sold telescopes and other educational stuff. I wrote a newsletter one month to put in a display where we had scopes and glow in the dark stars and stuff like that. People always wanted copies. We'd make them copies. It seemed popular enough so I did it each month. People wanted a copy so often it got disruptive to business. So I would take it to my dad's office and make q couple hundred copies to set out by the display. They always ran out. Some teachers asked if I'd fax copies to their school to use in class. Out of respect for the teachers whom I loved who helped me I did that. I did it long after the store closed and I was at university for several years. Eventually I stopped writing the newsletters but the summer of my junior year i worked at wttw store of knowledge, my specialty was juggling mysticks, if you've ever seen those. Anyway a teqcher recognized me and lamented no longer getting their monthly fax.
So I keep up. I still read a lot of sites, and newsletters and raw nasa stuff you can download.
And every time I'm outside at night, I look up at old friends.
Eyes to the skies
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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014
bigfan wrote:
Many that is true, but an incomplete statement.
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