1. How long have you been a stargazer, and what inspired you to get into stargazing?

This one is a difficult question to answer, since I can't really remember a time I wasn't interested in the Great Out There. However, my first memory of owning any sort of astronomical gear goes back to when I was four or five, when my parents bought me a book with a little planisphere bound into it. I was excited and anxious to get outside and try my "star wheel," but don't remember anyone ever actually taking me out under the night sky so I could use it. That was the genesis of my ongoing amateur astronomy gear-lust, though.

After that, flash forward to the 4th grade. I don't know if show-and-tell is something that's still done in elementary schools, but it was popular in those days of yore, giving both us and the teacher a break from our normal routine of studying the multiplication tables between duck and cover air-raid drills. It went like this: you brought an item to school (a toy, a book, even a pet), stood up in front of the class and gave a short talk about your item. Over fifty years later, I have no idea what I brought to show and tell on that day, but I do remember with crystal clarity my classmate Stephanie's presentation.

Stephanie usually brought cool stuff, but what she had this time was way beyond cool. Perched on a spindly black tripod was a gleaming white tube. Almost instinctively, I knew it was a telescope, a telescope for looking at the stars—not a dime-store spyglass you used for playing pirate. I couldn't figure out how you looked into it, though, since the "eye thing" seemed to be on the wrong end.

Stephanie explained this was a special sort of a telescope, a reflecting telescope, which used a mirror instead of a lens. She went on to reveal that she and her father had actually used this A.C. Gilbert (once a big name in kids' microscopes, telescopes and chemistry sets) to see the craters of the Moon. Imagine that. They could actually look at Moon craters. Any time they wanted!

All I knew was that I had to have one of these little 2-inch Gilberts. Understand me: not just something I wanted, something I had to have. I never was able to convince Mama and Daddy to shell out the considerable amount (by the day's standards) required so I could have my own Gilbert. But I didn't stop bugging them about telescopes, and a year later Daddy came home from work one afternoon bearing a 3-inch Tasco reflector he'd rescued from a Pawn shop.