First Light

Recently, my eldest son had his telescopic “first light.” He had already been showing a great interest in everything having to do with rockets and stars, and was routinely pointing the moon out in the sky, even when it was a barely perceptible sliver in the bright blue of midday. He had seen telescopes used by characters in educational cartoons, and understood that telescopes, “let us see far away.” He had also shown a fascination with helping me repair things, with proud declarations like, “We can fix it!” about everything from the clogged toilet to toy cars in need of fresh batteries.

I checked with him, asking, “Do you want to look through Daddy’s telescope.” He responded with a quick, “Yeah,” in his sweet little affirming voice. Thus I decided to bring my 8-inch Dobsonian reflecting telescope onto the front porch while I tended top sirloin on the grill. I excitedly set up the telescope after flipping the steaks one more time, a bated breath held since before his birth.

This particular telescope had graced my equipment stores since my fledging foray into astronomical studies in college. I had always been fascinated by the sky, the stars (and the wind) being my primary draws to physics, but I hadn’t begun to learn to do real field astronomy until Professor Ron Smith, a teacher with passion for his subject that to this day I have yet to see eclipsed, took me under his wing as a freshman. He had in fact helped me purchase the telescope as a birthday present the year we met.

The telescope’s finder was slightly off alignment, but I quickly had a crater, well defined by its position at the edge of the lunar terminator, centered in the eyepiece. I helped my son up to the eyepiece, careful to keeps his hands back lest he be left staring at a small magnified piece of blank sky. I carefully bobbed him up and down at the eyepiece until I thought I could see the light of the moon incident on his eye. “Do you see the moon?” I asked him expectantly. “Yes!” he responded in delight.

I showed him Jupiter in a similar fashion, and then let him down to manipulate the telescope (under supervision, of course). Besides showing him a real telescope at work for the first time, this day had been about letting him get to know, and hopefully develop and interest in, the equipment. He tipped the tube forward from the back, trying to look in the base of the telescope. Next, he ran to the front to look down the tube, cackling with glee at his parabolic reflection at the base. I told him that he was a good little astronomer.

A couple days later, it was foggy at home, and I knew there would be no chance to do any astronomy. I explained to my son that we couldn’t see the moon or the stars or the planets because of the fog. He later made sure that my wife knew what the fog had done, “We can’t see the moon, or the stars, or the planets.” He also made sure she knew, “I’m a good astronomer.”