Why Do We (astronomers) Look Up At The Stars Why Do Humans (you) Look At The Stars

[TJD]

Why Do You Look At The Stars (what Got You Into Astronomy)

[Octane]

Seeing images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. And, then, finding Heavens Above and hunting Iridium flares. Then doing some astronomy at university, whilst studying computer science.

However, ever since I was little, I had a fascination with the sky.

Regards,
Humayun

[spearo]

The voices told me to do it, it's not so bad when I wear my aluminum foil hat though...

Seriously, it started when I bought a small property outside the city and discovered what a dark (darkish) site's night sky was like. I looked up and thought "WOAH! I should get a scope to get a better look at this". I used a 100mm spotting scope for a year and then IIS forum advised me at the time of purchasing.
took one terrible image of M42 (i even put it on website) and I was hooked.
frank

[Analog6]

I grew up in the country and they are always there - circling around at night when you go out to do a lst check of the animals or get some air.

How could you not look?

And then you find what you are seeing is milleniums ago, and that some of them are planets, and then you see phtots through telescopes . . .

How could anyone NOT get hooked?

[Rodstar]

The immensity of it all never ceases to astound.

[erick]

Yes, this reason, and it's pretty, and it's good for me (recover/regen time).

[Baddad]

I developed a curious fascination back in the mid - late '60's. Not long after the asteroid knocked out the dinasours.
Amazing power up in the heavens. Black Holes. I gotta see that.

Still looking.

[desler]

The cheeky answer is, cause it's there!

So many places to visit and wonder at, right from your own back yard!
Who wouldn't?


Darren

[Davekyn]

Good question Trev...(is it ok to call you Trev?) For me, it’s many things...The main reason being I am a dreamer. Like Analog6 I grew up in the country as a young fella and it’s near impossible to avoid the stars when checking the animals or rounding up the wayward ones.

My fascination started very young...I was born in 1969 & possibly due to the fact that humans had only just landed on the moon & electronic gadgetry set to change the lives of the average family, I grew up watching a heap of sci-fi & loved it.

Hubble really did impact me & have to agree with Humayun there. It made me feel closer to the stars and seeing clouds like that in space really opened up my imagination. Not sure if you still use an atlas called Jacaranda at school but I used to love looking at the Solar System inside the front cover. During the 70s albeit the late seventies, I think mum used to let me know whenever another Nassa probe was doing its thing. I still got News paper articles from when a probe took a new pixilated shot of some planet or new discovery & I collected older news paper articles of the mooned missions. My science teacher never used to smash my head into the table like my maths teacher did...I always looked up to my Science teachers for that. They just seemed so much more ... mmmmmmm.......Chemically balanced. I guess what I am saying, is the space era had a big influence.

Lastly Trev...sometimes when things get a bit tough on Earth & I need some space, what better way to chill out than grab a scope and take a trip above and beyond. With all the info we have now available, the destinations just keep getting better & better + you really don’t need fancy equipment to go there.

I Just Love Staring Into Space at times...even without a telescope...I know the answer is out there somewhere & have the notion it’s more like a cross between an equation and some aliens misconception of spirituality spawn on some distant planet...But it’s ok, I’m not completely mad yet. It’s when you start thinking like that, you drop the scope and become like a walking antenna...Just don’t take too much in at once...need filters for that. LOL

Can’t wait till the sun sets (imagine weird sci-fi music about now)...Have to go to work...Have a good day Trev
Dave

[JethroB76]

The visit of Halleys Comet in 1986 got me hooked

[sheeny]

Because it's more interesting than TV!

:P

Actually, I had a mate in school who was into astronomy, and I got curious... I wanted to know, how do you do this?, how do you find things?, etc.

Al.

[PeterM]

In England as a kid I got hooked on Patrick Moore's Sky at Night and Dr Who. Then imagine my good fortune when the family up and move to to the best place South of the equator to safely enjoy this wonderful hobby with all the very best objects you could ever hope to see. I have also met some of my very closest friends through this hobby. Trevor, at 13 in this hobby/passion you have it all ahead of you. 20 years ago we imagined where this hobby might be now in terms of technology etc, we were barely close, it has exceeded all expectations.
PeterM.

[Rodstar]

It is interesting that some are answering this thread by speaking of how they first became interested. I do not mean this as a criticism.

What originally interested me is a long way removed from what keeps me in the hobby now.

My initial interest was sparked by views through a teenage friend's small Tasco refractor: Jupiter, the Moon etc. The idea of witnessing such objects was a novelty.

As an adult, I came more seriously into the hobby through a growing interest in the nature of the physical universe, and an awareness of the aesthetics of it. I continue to feed on that same impetus. Although many people I know quickly become fascinated when I speak about the universe, some people just glaze over. It seems to me that such people just haven't experienced that same sense of awe, and it always puzzles me how they could not be amazed by it. My wife is the classic example of this! Fortunately she is amazed by other things I have to share with her.

[PeterM]

Rodstar that would make another interesting thread, how many of our spouses/partners are also interested in this hobby and to what degree do they support us. I think my wife and yours must have been friends - "that dot there, that's it?" I have for several years been looking for new stars in galaxies far away, exploding ones that is. Why? The fascination of the immense forces at work and knowing that 99.9% of the population can't come close to imagining that. Perhaps being the first to "see" image an event like that and then thinking of the implications in millions and billions of years. That is after all why we are here. This keeps me looking at the stars and I thoroughly enjoy it.
PeterM.

[dannat]

I became interested because there was an astronomy themed unit at the school i was teaching that nobody wanted to take. I put my hand up & enjoyed it

My wife is also not interested, mostly because she thinks if I keep it up it will involve more costly expenditure in the future - she has even turned the kids on me - & now they tell me i can buy no more telescope stuff as I never have any money left for them :mad2:

[jungle11]

Im not really sure what first sparked my intrest.

But i remember in primary school a teacher took us out onto the school oval to make a scale model of the solar system. We put a basket ball in the centre and so on. Can't remember the exact figures so I worked it out like this:

If pluto was 100 metres from the sun (average) then the nearest star would be around 680 km away.:eyepop:

It blew my mind then, and it still does, and it always will. :)
To think something like us could exist here through what...chemistry, natural selection?? I love wondering at the big picture, and hope I never 'grow out of it'

[Kevnool]

A fascination which has always been there before i did something about it.
Cheers Kev.

[Ric]

Why, because it's blooming awesome.

One look at Omega Centauri, The Great Nebula or capture a visual of a faint galaxy (even if it is a fuzzy smudge) and I'm happy and content for days.

Under dark skies in the bush I feel what it must have been like for the early pioneers of astronomy.

To sum it up "I just love it"

Cheers

[avandonk]

You are children of the stars. Any atom in your body that is not hydrogen or helium was manufactured in a star eons ago. Normal stars can only produce by nucleosynthesis up to Iron. Any element higher than this can only be produced in a super nova. Every atom in the gold you see was produced by a super nova.

Bert

[Jen]

Because the sky looks so pretty :D
after a school project i had to do in primary school it got me very very curiuos about what is out there i have always looked above ever since
:love::love::love:

[Dog Star]

Yes Bert, I can really relate to that.:thumbsup: There is so much beauty in science!
That, and/or the fact that I'm a expatriate alien from stars far, far away and I really miss my true home.:D
We are children of the stars, both physically and metaphorically and we yearn for what we were, like salmon swimming upstream or birds migrating from one hemisphere to the other.
Or maybe we're just a bit "touched".:shrug:
We yearn for beauty and awareness. Is this not as it should be?:):thumbsup:

[Gargoyle_Steve]

I'm just in it for the chicks...

;)


That, and the fact that there's all that "infinity" out there - you walk outside and can look up at stars that are hundreds, even thousands of light years away. These are distances that yes, we can put numbers to, but that does NOT make those distances any more imaginable or "real" to us in our own normal frame of reference. They're incomprehensible distances, we try to tame these numbers by relating them to how long it takes at the speed of light, but we don't travel at that speed and we can't really relate those distances to our own life experiences.

eg: How far away is the Orion Neb away in "highway speed" Ford years?

Something like 1500 light years, 10,000,000,000 km's in a light year, divided by 100 km/h ...

That means IF you could drive at 100 km/h constantly, never stopping for food or fuel or to replace your totally worn out car it would take in excess of 17 MILLION years to reach this relatively local object.

Andromeda Galaxy, still a naked eye object, now were talking millions of light years instead of 1500 ....

Like I said, LOTS of "Infinity" out there, and yet we can look up at those unimaginable distances and see the Universe in action..... stars are born and stars die, galaxies collide and merge, gigantic gas clouds move and form shapes of incredible beauty - the list goes on and on.


W O W . . . .

[TJD]

ive always liked science in 2006 it was the night of the lunar eclips i looked for my 30mm refracter but i couldnt find it so i dicided to get a good tele scope i studied and studied until i came to a verdict i could only by a telescope from the astralian geographics shop so i went to the shop with my dad planing to get a asteromaster 130 eq and my dad suprised me
(i ended up with a nexstar 6 se) celestrons 6" sct with goto 40,000 objects to veiw my dad new nothing about astronomy but he made the best choice :thumbsup::bashcomp:and i dont like technolgey
now i 13 years old and i got a 6" sct and a 12" shywatcher dob what keeps me in astronomy
when i started i made a voul to find a comet or die trying when i find my comet i will call it (star of the heavens):thumbsup::astron:first some observing :lol:

[Jen]

:eyepop: wow wern't you a lucky boy Trevor :thumbsup:
can i have your dad to be my dad around Xmas time :lol::lol:
:D

[TJD]

my dads exsuse to mum was its an educational thing :D

[Paddy]

This is "what was your face before your parents were born?", so for me part of it is the koan aspect of it and part the unutterable serenity of gazing at things of extraordinary beauty at fathomless distance under a dark sky accompanied by crickets. Same things really.

[TJD]

looks like some people here had a good excuce to start astronomy


sorry about the spellling

[Baddad]

I often watch the National Geographic Foxtel channel. Birth of the Solar System, etc. Quoted on the program, "We are all made from 'Star Dust'.
Does this mean we will eventually become super nova or brown dwarfs?

According to the program we are the result of an exploded star. Perhaps there are aliens out there.
Many advances in radio communications was due to the findings of amateurs, radio hams. I believe Astronomy would be similar.

It is human nature to be curious. Man investigates his surroundings, his environment. With knowledge of his situation Man can then look to improve his quality of life.

I have a great curiosity about many things and this time it is Astronomy and looking for Black Holes and aliens. In years gone by I was not able to justify the expense of a good viewing system. I have now.

[casstony]

It seems a lot easier to capture kids imagination than adults. My interest was sparked as a youngster by sci-fi shows and the loan of a 4" reflector. It's great to watch my own kids interest shift from looking at the great shopping trolley in the sky to wondering about the fact that it takes time for light to travel from one place to another. I wonder if introducing them to basic concepts at a young age will make physics any easier to grasp in high school?

On the other hand, given our chances of interacting with another solar system people may be right to be disinterested in astronomy; most of the sky may as well be a painted picture.

[TrevorW]

I have daughters can't blame any of my hobbies on them as none of them were or are interested in science/sci-fi.

I always looked to the stars as a form of escapism

[chrisp9au]

I had no choice, my chosen career in the merchant navy forced me to look up at the stars!

Early sixties, no calculators, no satellites, the only way to navigate was with a sextant, chronometer, and a copy of Burton's Tables. Evening watch, beautiful sunsets, and then the brighter stars rising allowing us to take sights.

I still have my copy of Norton's Star Atlas from those days, Epoch 1950, and on Map 10 is a record of my first comet sighting. Half way across the Pacific heading for Panama, late 1965, and Comet Ikeya Seki stretching across the constellations of Corvus, Crater and Sextans.

Absolutely stunning, no light pollution out in the Pacific in those days! I was hooked, and today I can't look at Corvus without remembering that awakening!

Cheers
Chris

[PCH]

Chris,

I too well remember my MN days and the glorious 'pitch black' nights that we enjoyed out at sea. I didn't give a second thought to the spectacular darkness that you (can) get miles out at sea, but I would dearly love to see an equally black sky these days.

Sigh :(

[chrisp9au]

G'day Paul,

The last time I remember seeing skies like those that you get deep sea, was on a trip to Tibooburra years ago, but I didn't have scope with me that time. I retire in a years time, maybe I'll head up that way again!
Your 'sigh' tells me your into nostalgia, I trust you're aware of the Ships Nostalgia website?
http://www.shipsnostalgia.com/

Cheers
Chris

[TJD]

It's great to watch my own kids interest shift from looking at the great shopping trolley in the sky to wondering about the fact that it takes time for light to travel from one place to another. I wonder if introducing them to basic concepts at a young age will make physics any easier to grasp in high school?

well my father always tought me basic stuff when i was 3-13 and because of that i love science so i studie and read books and learn more and now im at high school :thumbsup: there teaching me stuff that i learnt 5years ago school its so much easier when you like all the subjucts and your friends with every one:thumbsup:

[DJ9]

I suppose the fact that when I look up at night, its hard not to wonder how insignificant this planet is compared to the rest of the universe and that most of us cant comprehend the sheer size of it. Looking at stars which can potentially be millions of times larger than this planet that is thousands or millions of light years away keeps me looking up at night.

Like jungle said, i like wondering at the big picture:)

[casstony]

Good to hear Trevor. Looking back at my own school years I feel the equations, etc didn't mean much to me because I was still trying to grasp the basic concepts.

Driving home from school recently my 9yo commented how big the Sun looked in the sky. I discussed with her how long it takes for light to arrive from the Sun or Moon, so the Sun really is gigantic. She had thought the Sun was the same distance as the Moon. It takes time for concepts to sink in.

[bluescope]

My first :eyepop: WOW moment was whilst on a camping trip in the South West of Western Australia with my son at a place called Meelup Beach. We were in my parents campervan and a very rough storm raged for some time then suddenly stopped and we stepped outside ... looked up and were stunned by a sky full of sparkling stars ... I had never seen such a display.

A couple of years later I had a photography gallery in Fremantle and had many hours to sit and read ... a friend loaned me a couple of astro magazines to pass the time and I was blown away by the images of the cosmos. Another shop keeper told me he had a 114mm Tasco Newtonian telescope that he never used and I was welcome to borrow. That started the fascination and once I saw the rings of Saturn through this shaky scope I was hooked.

Within a month I had bought a 200mm Skywatcher Newtonian on an EQ5 mount and was constantly out in my backyard trying to find new objects ... Omega Centauri was one of my favourites with it's tight ball of glistening gems and ofcourse the moon always got a viewing.

I then bought a Meade DSX 90AT Maksutov-Cassegrain with gotto from a guy in the US off ebay. It took three months to arrive but was well worth the wait. I learned a lot from the #497 controller, it has a wealth of information stored in it. I still think it's better than crappy SynScan and wish that SkyWatcher would get their act together to come up with software similar to Meade's ( sorry it's one of my peeves ).

A year or so later I bought a SkyWatcher 254mm Newtonian and an EQ6 Pro mount which enabled me to take images with my Canon 350D DSLR of objects other than the moon and bright star clusters ... Deep Sky objects were beckoning and I needed auto guiding to go to the next level. Oh ... I also bought a SkyWatcher 180mm Mak Pro just because it looked so spunky :lol: and I was flush with dollars.

Today I am living in a dark sky location with my own split roof observatory and an SBIG ST2000XCM astro ccd camera mounted on my William Optics FLT110 F7 Triplet Apochromatic Refractor. I still have all my other scopes and will use them again one day ... honest.

To think that all this started with a storm at Meelup Beach and then some borrowed magazines etc .... once you're hooked you're hooked :whistle:

I think I have waffled enough .... clear skies everyone !

:thumbsup:

[Jen]

:) Awwww nice story there bluescope :thumbsup:
And its good to see you have definately moved on up in the world with the size of your scopes ;):lol:

[bluescope]

Up then down again Jen :lol: but I love my 4.3" apo ... actually I love them all in their own way :whistle:

:thumbsup:

[Jen]

:) Yep i would keep them all :thumbsup:

[bluescope]

By the way what happened to your face in your avatar ... have you turned green with envy or something :lol: I don't remember it being green before :doh:

I hope it's not some sort of skin problem ... if so I apologise :whistle:

:thumbsup:

[Jen]

:lol::lol::lol: well if you checked out my confession thread you will see that im trying to find out what its like to be a Star Trek chic LMAO :rofl:

And yes everytime i see these awsome pics in here im always green with envy ;)

[bluescope]

No worries Jen !

:thumbsup: