“When you make the finding yourself — even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light — you never forget it.” — Carl Sagan
When I was 14, I fell in love with the universe. The discovery came with a one-time view of the planet Saturn through a telescope at a local “star party.” There was something so calm and comforting about gazing skyward at the twinkling dots spread across an inky black cosmos. Somewhere amid all the apparent serenity out in the universe, things must be incredibly more complicated than they were for an earthbound kid. So, in the cool spring of America’s Bicentennial year, I found a new habit: taking my family’s pair of 7x50 binoculars, grabbing a sleeping bag, and, with my dog in tow, wandering out from the edge of our neighborhood into a cornfield and lying down, taking long stares at the star fields and glows of the Milky Way above the southern Ohio landscape.
The sessions went from a few minutes at first to hours after a couple of weeks. I might as well have been on the Moon; civilization was shielded, the neighborhood tucked away behind a screen of trees, the sky fortunately dark, and my only companions were Oscar the border collie, the occasional rustle of a squirrel or raccoon, and the deep beauty of the sky above. As Earth slowly rotated, I saw the universe’s whole show — as far as we can see it from our place in the cosmos. Gradually, I learned constellations, recognized bright stars as my friends, and squinted toward the positions of fuzzy objects I couldn’t quite make out — clusters of stars and glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way Galaxy — as seen through the old binoculars. Before I knew it, I had been taken into another world. I didn’t exactly know why I had gone, except that this world was alluring for the mystery and the grandeur of the vastness of space.
Soon I was heading out to the cornfield observatory on virtually every clear night. Warm clothes protected against the chill of a late-night dew; ultimately, an extension cord allowed a radio to carry soft music to the scene. Star atlases and the soft glow of a red-filtered flashlight added the ambiance to what was becoming a junior science project. Each night, I got to know my new friends better and better — Vega, Deneb, Altair, the North America Nebula, Coma Berenices, and lots of other features presented themselves night after night. Once in a while, a bright meteor streaked overhead. One particular meteor that spring was an absolute monster — a magnitude –4 fireball that seemed to light up the ground in the early morning hours and, just as I was getting sleepy, jacked up my heart rate in an instant and perked up the dog.
Backyard astronomy became a way of life, an antidote to the uncertainty of teenage years in high school. Before I knew it, I had joined an astronomy club, volunteered to write their observing column, and bought a telescope. It was an 8-inch orange-tube Celestron SCT that, after a year of observing with the binoculars, brought a whole new dimension to viewing distant objects. Now the fuzzy things scattered across the sky were resolved into sharp, impressive detail, as star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies far away came into view. They too became well-known friends. There were so many of these so-called deep-sky objects, things beyond the solar system, that the astronomy club newsletter lacked room to write about them all. So, by age 15, I began publishing and distributing a newsletter that grew into a little magazine called
Deep Sky Monthly. It attracted a following of nearly 1,000 subscribers, and before I knew it, I was publishing it through the rest of my high school days and straight through college.
Where to look for advice about publishing on astronomy? Among others, I wrote to Carl Sagan at Cornell University. This was before the phenomenon of Cosmos struck the PBS airwaves in 1980. Carl wrote a long letter back with advice on what I was doing, and I found myself sliding deeper into astronomy, amateur journalism, and going to college. By this time, parties, ladies, rock ‘n’roll drumming, and all the usual teenage chaos had also worked their way into the equation. But I never forgot the advice that Carl Sagan delivered about the universe and how it should be studied. By the time I went to school at Miami University (which meant merely a cross-town move, as I was the son of a Miami professor),
Cosmos appeared on the scene and redefined how people thought about the universe.
For our generation of space nuts,
Cosmos changed everything. It was the most watched public television program ever up to that time (beaten more recently by Ken Burns’s
The Civil War). It somehow coincided with the right time for a new popular audience to care about what lurked well beyond Earth, perhaps spurred on by memories of the Apollo program and more recent successes of the Voyager and Viking spacecraft. Sagan very cleverly blended a variety of disciplines into a visually satisfying tour of the history of science, the then-current state of knowledge about the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe, and the philosophy of scientific thinking. The whole package was wrapped into a glitzy miniseries (by 1980 standards) that achieved an excellent balance of solid information, storytelling, and a little twinkle of hyperbole that pulled in the sci-fi crowd as well as the mainstream. Brilliant and immensely influential, the series defined popular thinking about science (as erroneously satirized in the oft-repeated Sagan quotation “Billions and billions . . .”). The series greatly influenced me as well as millions of others, and solidified my concepts of the universe.
The Sagan generation still undoubtedly thinks of the cosmos pretty much the same way it did a generation ago, when those sweaters were in. I know this to be true from talking to hundreds of amateur astronomers among the readership of
Astronomy magazine, the largest and most successful English-language magazine of its kind in the world, where I am editor. I know it from talking to dozens of advanced amateurs who frequent star parties and meetings each year across the country and around the world. Yet the times, they are changing. We live in a very different cosmos today than the one astronomers knew about 30 years ago. Not only does what we know about it make it significantly different, but it also is a much more interesting place from a philosophical standpoint. And answers to some of astronomy’s big questions, ones that deal with the origins and fate of the universe and of life as we know it, are now on the short-term horizon. In astronomy, we live in more interesting times than have ever been known before.