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Old 04-07-2009, 01:15 PM
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RonPrice (RonPrice)
Mr Ron Price

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Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: George Town, Tasmania, Australia
Posts: 28
2009: The iya: Some personal reflections

2009: THE IYA

This post is a personal reflection, a personal account, of my experience of astronomy and the influences that made for my present interest in this field at the age of 65 in these opening years of the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80).

The International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) is a year-long celebration of astronomy taking 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.

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, with whom I had contact up to the age of 23 with only a rare letter after that when I had moved in Australia, studied astronomy—although I don’t remember ever talking to him about his interests. My maternal grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, had more than a little interest in the subject, an interest I remember him having as far back as the 1950s when I was in primary school and visited by 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 have had a fascination with the subject since the start of the space age in the late fifties and early sixties 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 four decades. But I have never followed-up that interest in any serious way other than to attend two or three of those planetariums that dot the landscape of the cities of the world, to browse through a few books and listen and watch the occasional special on astronomy in the electronic media.

This file marks a beginning point to my own formal study, but it is a study that is largely episodic rather than systematic due to my wide academic interests. Time will tell how serious this episodic study will become given the variety of my other academic interests. In the first four years that this file has been in existence, March 2005 to July 2009, I collected two dozen 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.

Ron Price
4 July 2009
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