[mickoking]

It started for me when I was about 6 years old. We had a set of encyclopedias and one of the volumes was an atlas. In the back of the atlas was some stuff about the solar system, thats what stared it for me back in 1976. In the very late 70's my old man bought me a toy telescope, a 30x40mm with a table top tripod (seems popular) with that I saw the moon but not much else. In 1980 I got my first real telescope, a 60mm Tasco with a zoom eyepiece (x15 to x60) but no finder and right side up view. Even though that scope was a piece of crap I got my first views of Jupiter, Saturn (which blew me away) the Orion Nebula and the double star Alpha Centauri.