My Introduction to Astronomy

[RonPrice (RonPrice)]

INTRODUCTION

Part 1:

I have posted some 27 times at this site, but I can't find a record of this particular post, but this may be, in part, an old post. I'm not sure. This post is a personal reflection, a personal account, of my experience of astronomy and its study as well as the influences that made for my present interest in this field at the age of 71 in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as some human development psychologists call the years from 60 to 80 in the lifespan. I write this partly for myself, since I am a writer and, partly, for the possible interest of others. I don't get to this site as often as I'd like because I post at literally 100s of internet sites and serendipitously select a few sites each day to write on and interact, if timely, with others.

The International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) was a year-long celebration of astronomy that took place in 2009 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first recorded astronomical observations with a telescope by Galileo and the publication of Johannes Kepler's Astronomia nova in the 17th century. By 2009 I had been collecting astronomy resources in a file for only four years. I had only come to any degree of systematic study of astronomy in the years after my retirement from FT, PT and casual-volunteer work at several stages in the years 1999 to 2005.

Part 2:

Astronomy has never been part of the formal curriculum at any level of my educational experience. I have known several people personally with an interest in astronomy. My mother’s brother, Harold Cornfield and my maternal grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, had more than a little interest in the subject, an interest I remember them having as far back as the 1950s when I was in primary school and visited by uncle in his large home, and my grandfather in the small room where he lived with his eldest daughter Florence, my mother’s sister. I was exposed to the personality of my grandfather in the years 1944 to 1958 and to 1964 in the case of my uncle. I had contact with my mother’s brother until the age of 23 with only a rare letter after that when I had moved in Australia. He studied astronomy—although I don’t remember ever talking to him about his interests.

I have had a fascination with the subject since the start of the space age in the late 1950s and early 1960s and my becoming affiliated with the Bahá'í Faith back in the 1950s during my adolescence. It is difficult not to be interested in the subject being in the first generation to see the movement of man into space in the last five decades. But I have never followed-up that interest in any serious way other than: (a) to attend two or three of those planetariums that dot the landscape of the cities of the world, (b) to browse through a few books and (c) to listen and watch the occasional special on astronomy in the electronic media.

Part 3:

This file in my study now 10 years in the making marks a beginning point to my own formal study, but it is a study that is largely episodic rather than systematic due to my always wide academic interests. Time will tell how serious this episodic study will become given the variety of my other academic interests. In the first ten years that this file has been in existence, March 2005 to July 2015, I collected more than 30 articles and two lists of journals. A start had been made.

In 2009 astronomy was celebrating four centuries of its modern existence, beginning with Galileo in 1609. In December 2010 a National Geographic video-documentary was televised. It was entitled: Journey to the Edge of the Universe. In this first decade of my retirement, 2006 to 2015, there has been an increasing range of stimuli that have turned me toward astronomy. It will be interesting to see the development of this interest in these years of my late adulthood.

Ron Price
1/1/'11 to 21/7/'15.