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My first childhood "telescope" was cobbled together with available lenses and it was enough to view the Moon. But this endeavour arose from reading my grandfather's 1920s coffee-table book on the heavens. This spasmodic activity of assembling lenses into telescopes continued into my 20s (always with bad achromatic aberration) until one lunchtime a couple of us in the lab assembled a scope using a good 80mm objective with a microscope eyepiece. This scope was quite popular (except with the guy who used the microscope) and I spent many nights discovering that there was a lot that could be seen. But of course a long tube on a camera tripod is pretty hard to point anywhere specifically, so this became more frustrating than productive. In those times telescopes were quite expensive so with a growing family and intensive career my astro curiosity remained just that, until approaching retirement I found that I would have time and could afford a scope, so bought a Meade 8" LX50. This had insufficient room for cameras to clear the base when pointing at the pole and I upgraded to a 10" Meade SCT optical tube on a G-11 + Gemini. This is now housed in my observatory. Meeting an active astronomer would have got me going much earlier, so this is my message: always take time to show people what there is up there. Mostly they have no idea and there is a lot of reward for giving up a night of "serious" work.
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