The glorious Milky Way. Photo by Tony Hallas
When I was a young teenager, I leaned in interest toward medicine — a physician’s career, I thought. Then, at 14, I went to a local star party and saw Saturn through a small scope. That moment changed my life. All other interests ceased; I was obsessed with the sky and what lay in it. I was a teenager in a small town in Ohio, stuck between Cincinnati and Dayton in a little community called Oxford where Miami University, an old state school, was the main event. Besides the university, the town had rich outlying farmland and not much else.
That decision to immerse myself in amateur astronomy, falling in love with the sky, led to an adventure I could not have foreseen. The astronomy club that put on the star party needed someone to write about star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies in their monthly newsletter. The hyper-enthusiastic, green kid drew the assignment. Armed at first merely with binoculars (and later an 8-inch telescope), I observed so many deep-sky objects and began to draw sketches of the eyepiece views that I regularly stayed up all night observing and went right to high school the next morning.
Soon, my love for the heavens led me to create a whole magazine — a newsletter, really — all about deep-sky observing. The first issue of
Deep Sky Monthly, as I creatively titled it, rolled off the mimeograph machine in my father John’s chemistry office in June 1977. I was 15 and a fraction years old. Members of the Astronomical Association of Oxford, Ohio, as it was known, along with Cincinnati and Dayton amateurs, took pity on the young man and subscribed, and after a few issues there were more than 100 paid readers.
Publishing this magazine as I went through high school and college offered severe challenges, but it became a family affair. Once per month I traveled with my father to use a press loaned to us at the Dayton Museum of Natural History; later we had the magazine printed commercially in nearby Hamilton. The publication’s theme of observing, imaging, and endlessly discussing deep-sky objects coincided perfectly with the so-called Dobsonian revolution, which made larger telescopes available to backyard sky watchers. It also helped spawn an information renaissance revolution that led to observers going after many obscure objects they had never heard of before.
It was an exciting time for amateur astronomy. Right away, Comet C/1975 V1 (West) stunned us all, as did other observational events. The era of Apollo was fresh, the space shuttle age yet to come. Dozens of amateurs around the country and the world wrote me, sent articles, and submitted photos they had shot. It was a vibrant time for the hobby.
I’d become acquaintances of the editors at the two big astronomy magazines and made no secret that I would love to work for them one day. In 1982, Richard Berry, then editor of
Astronomy, called to offer me a job and buy
Deep Sky Monthly to continue it as a quarterly, something that I really wanted to see happen. By the time I started as assistant editor of
Astronomy and editor-in-chief of
Deep Sky magazine in September 1982, the latter had a circulation of more than 1,000.
I moved to Milwaukee and have been with
Astronomy magazine ever since. Times have changed. Now observers are used to viewing or imaging Sharpless nebulae, Maffei 1, sparse Abell galaxy clusters. After Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid 1990s, we’re overdue for a really bright comet.
I don’t get to observe as much as I did in the early days, both from staying busy, taking care of a family, and living somewhere really good sky opportunities are rare. Yet, through all the experience of the last quarter century, I can easily go back to that farm field in Oxford where I first set up my scope and, accompanied by my border collie Oscar, stayed out all night, hunting galaxy after galaxy, learning what was out there. It was all an unexplored mystery then, and I hope that Astronomy magazine now helps you with that magical sense of exploration that I first had way back when.