Kids these days!

 

When I was 9 years old, this was the house I lived in. The little boy that you can see there above the Chevy pickup is my 10-year-old brother. And that's my dad up there, smiling in the window. He was reshaping the existing window to please my mother who said, "I have to have a window over the kitchen sink. I'll be happy if I can look out a window while I'm washing the dishes." 

Of course, at that time, there was no kitchen sink in our house! It had no indoor plumbing! Our water came from a 25-foot well just a few feet from the back door. We used an old-fashioned hand pump, probably from the 1930s, to pump water into a bucket and then we'd carry the water into the kitchen for drinking, cooking, and bathing. A rain barrel under one corner of the barn roof collected enough water to use for priming the well, as needed. 

Our bathroom was also old-fashioned. A little ol' shack out back was our bathroom, and it had no running water, either! The outhouse took a little getting used to, but we used it without complaint.

Our outhouse (at left) and the old barn. Neither one
still stands today.

My father, who could do anything, confidently planned on installing the plumbing throughout the house. And so that large rectangular hole he cut into the kitchen wall of our house did, indeed, become a picture window over the kitchen sink, which he eventually did also install. And by our second winter of living in my great-grandparents' house, there was finally a bathroom in the basement, and we no longer needed to grab a flashlight and walk across the yard in the middle of the night when nature called!

In 1970, my father and his brother had just purchased the family farm from their aunts and uncle for $3000. That was quite a sum. My dad had to go into debt to pay his half. It was worth going into debt for. Thirty-seven acres of farmland with a house and a barn. But the house was truly a fixer-upper! The basement of the house had a dirt floor. In the 1960's, it was used as a "potato cellar" by my great-uncle and his then widowed mother, who had immigrated from Sweden on her honeymoon in 1900. When we moved into the farmhouse, the old rotten potatoes were still there! My dad and a neighbor dug out the potatoes, packed and leveled the dirt, and poured the concrete for the basement floor. 

The bathroom was finished before there was a set of basement stairs from the kitchen. Previously, there had been an old home-made ladder down to the potato cellar, and a kitchen door to the cellar already existed. For several weeks, we used a step ladder to get from the kitchen doorway downstairs to the bathroom, and back up to the kitchen again. Eventually, Dad built a staircase out of two-by-fours and plywood, which was never painted or finished for as long as we lived there. Dad had laid out a couple of rooms in the basement, including the bathroom, with studs, and he ran electrical wiring through the studs for wall outlets and light switches. But he couldn't afford the drywall needed to make the rooms. We hung blankets around the bathroom for privacy, and large sheets of plastic for the shower walls.

Needless to say, we were very poor in 1970. During that summer, we had precious little money, and we lived off the land. And it was not like you'd think! Living on a farm, you'd think "living off the land" meant raising crops like tomatoes, corn, beans, and squash. You'd think that we had livestock like cows, pigs, and chickens that we butchered for meat. You'd think that we got eggs from our chickens, and that we milked cows for our dairy products. But, no! We had none of those things. The farm had been abandoned for years. The cows and chickens were long gone. All that remained of a once flourishing dairy were the sights and smells of old collapsed buildings and rusting equipment. And my father was not a farmer! 

My great-uncle and his two draft horses,
standing between the barn and outhouse
circa 1960.

In our case, living off the land meant that my three siblings and I went out every day to pick wild berries in the fields. That was our food! Wild strawberries in June, wild blueberries in July and August, and wild blackberries in September. That is what we lived on. My mother would buy some Bisquick at the grocery store, and we'd have strawberry shortcake, morning noon, and night. If we were lucky, we might also afford some Spam and eggs from time to time. 

Oddly, at Christmas time, my parents took our requests for presents. As if we could wish for something and they could magically grant it. My brother and I asked for a telescope, but we got Matchbox cars. Go figure. We weren't disappointed, mind you. We loved our Matchbox cars and played with them for hours outside, under the shade of the apple tree, building roads in the dirt and driving our Matchbox cars on them. 

My parents were very thrifty. One year at Christmas, my brother and I each got a pair of used and very old leather hockey ice skates from the Salvation Army store. They were 35 cents a pair. In the winters, my brother and I would carry our skates across the road and down into the 900-acre wood, where we'd play hockey on frozen ponds. We cut small tree branches for hockey sticks and used a piece of bark for a puck. 

But nothing could beat our best Christmas ever! My dad wouldn't allow us kids to go in the barn for about a month. He was sawing up old lumber from some of the old buildings on the farm and doing a lot of hammering. We kids could not imagine what in the world he was building out there in the stable. But on Christmas morning, we were finally allowed to go out and see our Christmas present: a pony, eating hay in her stall that Dad built.

Now, you might ask, "How could your poor parents afford to buy you a pony for Christmas?" Well, it was simple. Our neighbors were moving away, and they couldn't take their pony with them. So, they gave it to us. The pony cost us nothing. After all, we already had the barn to put her in, and acres and acres of alfalfa and timothy for her to eat. She came with a bridle, saddle, and blanket for riding. 

Pictured above is me helping my sister get started on a ride with Queenie, our Shetland pony. In the background, you'll note a pup tent (at left), where we sometimes camped out on pleasant summer nights. Also note the "tongue-and-groove" deck that my dad built as a back porch. He used the boards from the old silo. He got some old railroad ties for free and used them for the staircase. We used the space underneath the deck to store firewood. Daily fires in the cast iron stove in the living room kept us warm in the winter. We would wake up to a very cold house in the mornings. We could see our breath around the breakfast table. 

I marvel at my childhood on that old farm in Pennsylvania. With very little money, my parents gave us a wonderful and rich life in the country. I couldn't provide that kind of life for my own kids in the 1990s! I made much more money than my parents, but all I could afford to give my kids was an apartment in the city! My kids never got a pony for Christmas! But they did have running water and an inside toilet! They didn't know what it was like to sleep outside in a pup tent or play hockey in the woods in the wintertime. They never tasted chestnuts roasted in a Ben Franklin stove. They didn't get to play in a barn and swing off a rope into a pile of hay. But they did have computer games and cable TV. And they didn't go hungry, and they didn't have to pick wild berries in order to survive.

My parents and my siblings and I lived in utter poverty at a time when information was as difficult to obtain as a good meal. We didn't have smartphones, computers, or cable TV, and the only books available were the ones in our house. We couldn't afford newspaper and magazine subscriptions. There wasn't enough leisure time for our parents to drive us into the city and spend hours at the public library. There was a library at our elementary school, but I didn't have daily study halls, like the older students, to spend time reading in the library. The school library was a place I visited once a week to get lectured on the card catalog, the Dewy Decimal System, and being quiet in the library. I was the kind of kid who spent most of the daylight hours playing or working outside. My brother and I spent our Saturdays mowing 5 acres of grass with push lawnmowers. We would play baseball together, mumblety-peg, go exploring through the large rock formations down in the woods, ride our bicycles on the quiet, country roads. Reading books was boring to me. So, I didn't have much interest in the school library, and I daydreamed through the librarian's lectures. 

Imagine for a second that my parents could have given me a telescope for Christmas in 1970. What if, just like getting us a pony for free, they knew somebody who had an old telescope lying around that they didn't mind parting with? That would have been amazing! But then what? How would I learn how to use it? How would I learn anything about the night sky and what I could see with my telescope? 

There was nobody in my immediate or extended family who could teach me about astronomy. There was nobody I knew who could look up into the night sky and point out for me Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, or Perseus and Andromeda. We lived a hundred miles away from Pittsburgh's Buhl Planetarium. Our public school didn't teach courses in astronomy.

I was a little too young to pay much attention to the Apollo moon landings. I remember our family gathering around the TV and watching the live broadcast in the summer of 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped down off the Eagle's ladder and eerily hopped around on the dusty surface. But what I don't remember were the 10 missions prior to Apollo 11. My parents were quite religious, and I don't know what their feelings were about men ascending up into the heavens. I can only assume that since I have no memories of any of the Gemini and Apollo missions leading up to Apollo 11, then my parents must not have been very excited about the space program. My brother and I never had very many toys to play with, but there were certainly no toy rockets or astronauts among our collections of building blocks, Tinker Toys, and Matchbox cars.

I vaguely remember one of the later Apollo missions, because we watched it at school. It must have been either Apollo 12, later that same year, or possibly Apollo 14 in April of 1971. Couldn't have been Apollo 13, because I don't remember any anxiety in the room, and what we were watching was extravehicular activity on the moon's surface, not astronauts inside their space capsule. 

The classrooms at our school were modular, and the giant, carpeted wall panels could be separated to create one large room for special assemblies. I remember one such occasion when our teachers opened up those walls, brought in a couple of 30-inch CRTs on tall, rolling carts and several grades of students watched together as the astronauts conducted various activities on the lunar surface. It was kind of boring, to be honest. I wasn't close enough to the TVs to see very well. The broadcast seemed to last for hours, with lots of dead time. And most of us children in the room didn't even understand what the astronauts were doing anyway.

The American public quickly lost interest in the space program. We had beaten the Russians to the moon and our astronauts did some exploring and experimenting and brought back some moon rocks when they returned to earth, and that was that. I think most Americans didn't care about the science. They mostly just cared about the adventure and the competition of getting to the moon. After watching a few rocket launches, they became routine and television viewing audiences dwindled. 

Even I have to admit that the moon landing of 1969 didn't have much of an impact on my young mind. I wasn't inspired by the news coverage of the Apollo missions to become an astronaut. I did not become curious about space at age 7, and I didn't begin to pester my parents to buy me books about astronomy. I didn't gaze up at the moon and wish I could go there, too. 

Then again, in those days we didn't have the barrage of news coverage that we have today. We didn't have 24/7 news channels on TV back then. The ABC, CBS, and NBC news came on for an hour at noon, 6 PM, and 11 PM. At noon, I was at school. At 6 PM, I was doing my homework. And by 11 PM, I was in bed. News from space reached our household sporadically and the adults in our family didn't find it interesting or important enough to bring it to the attention of their children.

My parents didn't even buy a newspaper the day after Neil Armstrong made his famous speech with the missing word. It would be cool to still have an original edition of the local newspaper with headlines announcing the first humans landing on the moon. But I guess it didn't mean that much to our family then. Apollo 11 really was a flash in the pan. A big celebration on one day, and then the whole thing was quickly forgotten. Our daily lives went back to normal as if nothing had happened.

A lot of amateur astronomers in my generation claim that it was the Apollo moon missions that sparked their interest in astronomy. Others say that they caught the astronomy bug when someone (a neighbor or relative) showed them the moon's craters or Saturn's rings in their telescope. According to their stories, they were caught off guard by these experiences and were immediately inspired to begin their own personal and lifelong journeys to become backyard astronomy enthusiasts. That was definitely not the case for me! The moon landing fell flat and there was no one in my sphere of influence who had any special knowledge about backyard astronomy.

To be perfectly honest, my lifelong, backyard-astronomy journey got its start due to the lack of astronomical information available in the 1970s. 

Yeah, believe it or not, it was the famine of astronomical knowledge that aroused my interest at 19 years of age. I looked up at a sky full of stars one night and asked myself why I couldn't identify any of them! Why had I never understood the moon's phases? I felt embarrassed to know nothing about the universe as I reached my adult years. But in my defense, astronomical knowledge was hard to find in the 1970s. If I didn't go looking for it, it wouldn't come looking for me! For whatever reason, I had never been curious enough to really go looking for it. And it wasn't just me. Nobody around me cared about it, either. There are many reasons why astronomy was unpopular in those years, some of which I will discuss in the following paragraphs.

Ironically, despite the Great Space Race and the pinnacle of Apollo 11, the 1970s were technologically poor times for backyard astronomy. In those years, telescopes were scarcely seen in daily life, except on a rare occasion when you happened to find yourself in a camera store, and only if it happened to be a camera store that had a telescope or two on display. Some department stores sold good-looking refractors on wooden tripods, but the hardware was so cheap that the telescopes were practically unusable. I bought one of these telescopes in 1980, and I was never able to get it aimed at anything in the sky. I'd loosen the lock knobs on the telescope axes, move the tube around until I saw something in the eyepiece. Then I'd lock the knobs and let go and the telescope tube would sag just enough so that my target disappeared again from the field of view. I quickly returned the telescope to the store and got my money back. Unfortunately, a lot of beginning backyard astronomers got frustrated and gave up on the hobby altogether because of those poorly made department store refractors. They became known as "hobby killers." 

Photographic film in the 1970s was very slow (not sensitive enough) for celestial targets. Because of this, astrophotography was unpopular amongst backyard astronomers. It was expensive to get started, and thereafter, it was a lot of work to set up the equipment properly and guide exposures for hours, only to achieve unimpressive results. High-resolution pictures of the planets were practically impossible with film. Exposures had to be too long, allowing atmospheric smearing and perhaps motion blur from telescope tracking errors at high power. The world's largest telescopes yielded only blurry and grainy black-and-white pictures of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. So, nobody was authoring sensational coffee table books about astronomy in the 1970s that might inspire young hearts and minds. 

Consider the pictures of Jupiter below. These were captured by the 200-inch Palomar telescope. They were found in the large (328-page) tome, Pictorial Astronomy, printed in 1969. There's not a single, color picture in that book! This series of photos were the only closeups offered of the King of Planets, found across the page from a fuzzy and washed-out photograph of Saturn taken by the 100-inch telescope at Mt. Wilson. These are in a two-page chapter of the book with the chapter heading, "Giant Worlds of the Solar System." Those were the two best telescopes in the world at the time, and this is the best they could do? Not very inspiring!

© 1969, Clarence H. Cleminshaw and John G. Phillips

(Pictorial Astronomy; Thomas Y. Crowell Company, NY)

Even if somebody could have taken fantastic and sharp color pictures of celestial objects in those years, printing high quality color photographs was an expensive process for book and magazine publishers. They balked at publishing picture books (in color) about astronomy, because astronomy was unpopular. It was a Catch-22. Publishers weren't going to risk spending a lot of money to print books about a topic that so few people cared about. But maybe more people would have cared about the topic if there were beautifully illustrated books about it! 

The late Robert Burnham, Jr., lamented over this problem. He approached several publishers who turned down his enormous, three-volume "Burnham's Celestial Handbook," because they feared the public's general lack of interest in the subject would kill their profits. In Burnham's case, the publishers complained that its 2000+ pages would have to be sold at a prohibitively expensive price to consumers, which added to the difficulty of making sales. He chose instead to self-publish his monumental work and he found out the hard way that all those publishers who turned him down were right. He died in poverty. 

Astronomy has a one-two punch that made it very unpopular amongst the masses in the 1970s. First, astronomy is mostly a nighttime and outdoor hobby. You have to stay up late and so you are usually tired. And it's almost always colder than you think it is outside at night. That's because when you go outside for a few minutes at night, it doesn't feel very cold, so you don't feel the need to put on warmer clothing. But astronomy requires that you stay outside for longer than a few minutes! Before you know it, you're chilled to the bone, your teeth are chattering, and all you want to do is go back inside where it's warm and go to sleep. And it may have been really just a mild 64° F when you were out in the night air. 

However, being cold and tired isn't the only drawback. Secondly, there is the steep learning curve of trying to sort out our place in the universe, so that we can understand what we're looking at in the night sky. How do the planets move? Why can't we see Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in the sky every night? Why are the moon's phases constantly changing? And why do we sometimes see the moon during the day? That doesn't seem right! Why does each season bring us new stars and constellations to learn, and what happened to all of the stars and constellations we learned 6 months ago? These are the sorts of things our public schools typically failed to teach us. Not surprising, really, since our classes were held during the daytime. None of us kids would have wanted to go back to school at night for an evening session to learn about astronomy.

There was an even steeper learning curve to figure out how to use a telescope to find invisible things in the sky. Invisible because they are so small and dim. Telescopes weren't "smart telescopes" in those years. So, if you happened to develop a deeper interest in backyard astronomy and you wished to see things like star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, you had to learn how to navigate the stars with a telescope that you aimed yourself. This required learning all the bright stars and constellations well enough to match them up with your star charts. With the limited access to information and lack of a mentor back in the 1970s, it could take many months and possibly years to learn those things on your own, especially when clear nights were few and far between! 

And if you ever wanted to put a camera on your scope and take pictures of celestial objects, you had to learn all about film cameras and photography, which was still very primitive in 1970! Film photography in 1970 hadn't changed much in the previous 40 years when my grandfather began taking pictures with his camera. Films were insensitive for low-light applications. In bright daylight, you could get pretty decent pictures using short exposures, say, 1/250th of a second. That's a fast enough shutter speed to take a pleasing picture, even with a long telephoto lens, and just holding the camera up to your eye with your hands as you shoot. But in the shadows, or in cloudy conditions, or at morning or evening when the sun's rays were dimmed significantly, you would have to slow the shutter speed to something more like 1/30th of a second, which is long enough to cause motion blur from your finger pressing the shutter button. You would need to put your camera on a tripod for those pictures, and use a cable release so that your fingers didn't have to touch the camera. Cameras had to be manually focused in those days, and the camera's optical viewfinder was extremely difficult to use in the low-light conditions of astronomy. If you were taking wide-field pictures of stars over a landscape, you would have to take extra care to focus on the few bright stars that you could see through the viewfinder. But later, when you looked closely at your pictures, you'd discover that, despite your careful efforts, the star images were fuzzy and bulbous (out-of-focus).

To make photography even more difficult to learn, you had no immediate results to view after taking each picture. The camera didn't have an LCD screen, so you couldn't see whether or not the focus was off, or if the exposure was too long or too short. Today's cameras give the photographer the chance to immediately try again and keep shooting until you get it right, so that you can move on to your next target with confidence that your previous shot was great. The trial-and-error method of learning the ropes with film photography took many months, instead of minutes. You would have to bracket your exposures by taking at least three pictures with normal, over, and under f-stops and shutter speeds, hoping that at least one of them would turn out. You would also have to write down your settings for each shot, so that when you got your film back, you could look at the negatives and see how your camera settings affected each exposure. There was no automatic recording of the camera's "meta data." Cameras were mechanical, film was analog, and your exposure times required a lot of guess work, trying your best to follow charts (included with each roll of film) for the appropriate f-stops and ASA speeds, according to the amount of light you were shooting in. If you really wanted to learn from your mistakes, you had to keep a notebook handy while you were taking pictures and write down the exposure parameters for each shot.

Flash photography was even more difficult to learn, because of the inverse-square law of light. You had to get a feel for matching the intensity of the flash with its distance from your subject. Indoor church wedding photography, for instance, is a nightmare. That's something that was best left to the professionals in the old days. But professional photographers were expensive to hire! So, sometimes the bride and groom would ask someone they knew in their families who was a photographer of sorts to take their wedding pictures. While these amateurs may have felt honored to be chosen to take the pictures at the wedding, there was an enormous amount of pressure on them. Amateur photographers were less likely to have much experience with flash photography. It's a whole different animal than natural light photography. First of all, you had to buy a different type of film to shoot under incandescent lighting, as opposed to shooting in sunlight, so that your pictures didn't come out with too much green color. And you must continually adjust your flash settings while you sneak quickly and silently around the sanctuary, moving toward or away from your subjects so as to frame your pictures in artistic ways in low light (sometimes only candlelight). And there are specific events in the wedding service that have become traditional shots desired in wedding portraits. You don't get second tries at those moments, so you really have to be confident in your camera settings. You would shoot up your roll of film and simply hope for the best! Because it could take as long as two weeks to get your results. You would be thrilled when the pictures turned out better than you expected. But then you were absolutely devastated when they turned out terrible, especially when your entire extended family was counting on you to take great pictures of the wedding or a family reunion! Believe me when I tell you that it was no fun being the family photographer in those days! Photography could be quite discouraging, causing many would-be photographers to give up on the hobby.

Young amateur astronomers in the 1970s were an odd bunch. That was before it was cool to be a nerd! Nerds were picked on, laughed at, and bullied in school. They were loners. They spent lots of time reading, tinkering, and learning how to build things that their peers couldn't even comprehend. Early computers, for instance, came as kits that required complicated assembly that only the nerds could figure out. Commercial telescopes, which were mechanically simple to understand, were still too complicated to use, requiring the mental skills of a nerd to sort out. Well-constructed and user-friendly telescopes were either unavailable or unaffordable, and a lot of amateur astronomy nerds were forced to make their own telescopes. Do a YouTube search for an interview by Patrick Moore with Ron Arbour and his computer-controlled telescope in 1985, and you'll be amazed at what a nerd could do back then! Everything from grinding a telescope mirror, to making a full-blown computerized telescope, to making his own "cold camera" with dry ice, to developing his film in his darkroom. It was a very lonely process for the nerds. They didn't have helpful friends hanging around to encourage them. So, while all the "cool kids" and their followers were out partying on weekend nights, or going to school dances, sporting events, and rock concerts, the astronomy nerds were at home, alone in their basements and back yards, building and testing and calibrating their homemade telescopes and then taking them outside with their star charts to find double stars, nebulae, and galaxies the hard way. 

The 1970s were by no means the least popular years for backyard astronomy and astrophotography. All through the 20th century, only a tiny fraction of the population became interested enough in backyard astronomy to make it their hobby. And not merely for the reasons stated above. There were, after all, the social and economic setbacks of two world wars. Starting with the second world war and following on into the Cold War, a new generation of amateur astronomers was born. The Great Space Race brought astronomy back into importance for even the common folk. Observers everywhere were needed to spot aircraft and satellites in the night sky. Military pilots were required to learn the bright stars and constellations for navigation purposes during night-bombing raids in faraway places. Astronauts also needed to use celestial navigation while traveling in their rocket ships in outer space. These celestial observing skills and general astronomical knowledge learned by the pilots and astronauts were sometimes passed down to their children. But the focus on looking out for flying machines at night didn't necessarily get skywatchers interested in deep-space objects like star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. People were more focused on the moon, inspired by thoughts of astronauts traveling there during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and early 1970s. Small, ample refractors were the ubiquitous instruments of backyard astronomy until the 1970s. They were relatively inexpensive, and they performed well on the moon, planets, and bright stars. To make a scientific endeavor out of their hobby with small refractors, amateur astronomers were encouraged by the professionals to take up variable star monitoring, a science that needed the help of an army of observers. And small refractors easily met the challenge to observe thousands of bright variable stars.

The return of Comet Halley in the 1980's is what really turned the populace into willing backyard astronomers! Like I said, we didn't learn much astronomy at all in the public school, but most of us had at least heard about Halley's Comet (which, incidentally, everyone back then knew as "HAY-lee's Comet" and not "HAL-lee's Comet"). Although, I must say that backyard astronomy also got a lot of new attention from the two Voyager spacecraft that were sent off to visit the major planets in 1977. Additionally, a lot of prime-time television series were doing their part to inspire the masses to get into astronomy. The Outer Limits series, with its beautiful astrophotos in the closing credits was one such program. The Star Trek TV series and movies were also popular, as was Space 1999. And then, of course, the Star Wars movie trilogy. Suffice it to say a lot of people who had been inspired by these movies and TV shows wanted to buy their own telescopes to look at Comet Halley when it arrived in 1985 and 1986. Telescope manufacturers stepped up their production lines in an effort to keep up with the demand.

The 1980s also saw vast improvements to photographic film sensitivity. The best we had in the 1970's was Kodak's ASA (similar to ISO in digital cameras) 400 speed film. But in the 80s, we saw jumps to ASA 800, ASA 1000, ASA 1600, and finally ASA 3200. Astrophotographers like me welcomed these faster films that shortened our exposure times and therefore made guiding our exposures less tedious. We looked forward with great anticipation to faster and faster films in the future that would eventually permit us to take snapshots with our telescopes. Alas! This never happened! The only thing that we got in the future was auto-guiders. Today's astrophotographers don't shoot the brief 30-minute or 1-hour exposures we did with film. No! They shoot 50-hour exposures and longer, because digital imaging didn't improve camera sensitivity very much. But since they don't have to sit outside guiding exposures by hand, modern astrophotographers don't care how long their exposures take. They simply program their telescopes and cameras to operate without them, and they go off to bed while their instruments collect images of their targets all night.

We backyard astronomers in the 1980s who saw Halley's Comet and took pictures of it witnessed the benefits of the improvements to film and telescope technology. But astronomy was still rather unpopular with the masses, so we became evangelists. We would talk to our neighbors and invite them to come over and look at the moon and planets through our telescopes. Some amateur astronomers took their evangelism to the street corners. They would set up their telescopes on the city sidewalks and invite passersby to take a look at the sun, moon, Saturn's rings, or Jupiter and its moons. Astrophotographers would amaze their families and friends with beautiful color pictures of nebulae and galaxies that they shot with their own equipment in their back yards. Most people in those days, who were not into astronomy, had never seen "nebulae and galaxies" before and were not even familiar with those words! 

During that decade, "outreach astronomy" became very popular amongst amateur astronomers and amongst amateur astronomy organizations. We felt a need to tell others about backyard astronomy. What motivated us the most was our personal histories. We looked at our own stories of growing up in the public schools, learning nothing about astronomy or the night sky, and then after somehow becoming interested in stargazing and then through years of trial and error, we finally gained success and found fulfillment and happiness as backyard astronomers. We wanted to help others experience that happiness, without needing to take as long or work so hard to get there. The brilliant and lovable sidewalk astronomer John Dobson would say to backyard astronomers, "It's not about how many objects you get to see through your telescope; it's about how many objects you let others see through your telescope that counts."

But we faced a large obstacle when we tried to get others interested in astronomy. That obstacle was the great cost of quality telescopes. I would show people Saturn or Jupiter in my Meade 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and they'd say, "Gee! That's great! How much did your telescope cost?" I'd have to admit that it cost me more than $2000, which was pretty much the end of their interest in trying to get started in backyard astronomy! Money was still too tight to mention in the Reagonomics years of the 1980s. My neighbors and friends might be willing to come back from time to time to look through my telescope again, but they weren't about to spend $2000 to get their own telescopes. In reality, though, most of them wouldn't usually come back to look at other celestial objects through my telescope, because coordinating those observing sessions was difficult in Pennsylvania. There are far more cloudy nights than clear nights in that part of the country. And clear nights on weekends, when our work schedules didn't interfere with our get-togethers, were extremely rare. Weekend nights might be okay in the summertime, but in winter, fall, and even spring, nobody wanted to be outside after dark! It was too cold for just standing around waiting for their turn at the eyepiece.

While Dobson's idea of sharing your telescope with others was a good one, it often wasn't practical. So, the only alternative was to find a way to get the masses to buy or make their own telescopes. Dobson offered seminars for people to attend and build their own low-cost telescopes. It was an excruciatingly slow experience. It took nearly a year just to grind their mirrors. Only the most tenacious and patient telescope makers found success in those seminars. Persuading people to purchase a telescope for themselves failed miserably. Nobody's going to invest thousands of dollars on a telescope that they can only rarely use, due to the poor weather in most of the country. If only telescopes could be cheaper. As I mentioned already, however, there's also that steep learning curve. Let's face it. Backyard astronomy is too complicated, too inconvenient, too uncomfortable, too boring, and too expensive. What's the use?

The 1990s brought, by far, the biggest and best improvements to backyard astronomy. The most important technology of the 1990s was the personal computer, which was soon followed by the increasing popularity of the internet. We had finally arrived in the "information age." All of the world's knowledge was suddenly available to everyone. No need for flipping through the pages of the small number of books in your house. No need to even go to the public library. Everything you ever wanted to know about the universe is right there at your fingertips.

Computers gave us the power of calculations far beyond even the sophisticated Texas Instruments pocket calculators that replaced our slide rules in the 70s. Planetarium software showed us what was visible in the night sky for any date and time we planned to take our telescopes out. Where's Jupiter tonight? No need to consort the Astronomical Almanac at your public library! Just search for Jupiter in your computer software. Which constellations will be overhead in the evening sky this weekend when we go camping in the mountains? No need to relearn how to use our planispheres and then dig out our paper star charts to plan our deep-sky targets! Just set the date and time in your planetarium software and zoom in to see all the deep-sky objects within range of your telescope.

Computers also enabled the changeover of film photography to digital photography. We can now take pictures with our digital cameras and process the pictures on our computers far easier than working with dark rooms or dealing with the One-Hour Photo lab clerks. And digital cameras come with LCD displays that finally give us those instant results we always wished we had. We can finally take a picture and inspect it instantly and know whether our focus and exposure settings were good or bad. We can take a picture of everyone at our family reunion and know instantly whether we need to take a second, third, or fourth shot. In fact, we can take as many shots as as we want! There's no film to waste!

When telescope makers put computers inside their telescopes in the mid-1990s, the real revolution was born! Self-pointing telescopes put an end to fruitless searches in the dark for our celestial targets. We no longer have to figure out star charts. We simply tell the telescope which object we want to see, and it points itself at it. Wow! Too easy!

The revolution continued into the 2000s with home networks allowing us to connect our telescopes and cameras to our computers. Now we no longer even have to be outside in the cold to look at our celestial targets with our telescopes and cameras. We sit at our computers in the comfort of our living rooms and send commands to our telescopes out in the back yard. Our camera on the telescope takes a picture and sends it over the network to our living room, where we look at it on our computer screens. After viewing that object, we send commands to the telescope to go to our next target and take a picture.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any better, the internet also gave us YouTube, where you can watch videos by amateur astronomers showing you how they take and process their stunning 50-hour exposures of nebulae and galaxies! They'll tell you everything you need to know in order to purchase telescopes, software, and cameras to start your own backyard astronomy journey, and they'll even tell you how to use all of the equipment and software. I would have loved to have all this information at my fingertips back in 1980, when there was no one to help me learn about telescopes, cameras, and the night sky!

Oh, and I forgot to even mention the space telescopes and their images that are available to everyone on the internet! We didn't have the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1970s and 1980s to inspire us with its images of nebulae and galaxies that had incredible, never-before-seen resolution and sharpness. It was like the difference between CRT displays of 1980s television sets and modern 8k TVs. Back in the 1980s, as I mentioned earlier, beautiful color pictures of celestial objects were difficult to come by. Nowadays, you can Google any of the millions of objects in the night sky and find big, beautiful pictures of them taken by both amateur and professional astronomers. 

The long and the short of it is that in the 1970s and 1980s, the hobbies of backyard astronomy and astrophotography were so difficult that relatively few people had the toughness to pursue them. But in the 1990s and 2000s, everything became so incredibly easy to do that budding backyard astronomy enthusiasts weren't even required to know anything about astronomy or the overwhelming star patterns and constellations in the night sky before taking their first stunning images of star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. After watching one YouTube video, a 12-year-old kid, who can't even name one star in the sky, can quite literally purchase all of the telescope and camera gear she needs using her parents' credit cards. When everything is delivered, she can unbox the stuff and go outside on the same night, put everything together, and take far better pictures of a nebula or galaxy than I could take with film after years of practice!

It's a radically different world that we live in today. Where are the poor people today who can't afford to buy their kids iPhones, e-Bikes, and PlayStations? Back in the day, the vast majority of people in the US struggled to make ends meet. We pinched pennies for years in order to buy a $150 telescope. Automobiles for the rich cost $15,000 back then. Nice new houses were $40,000 for 2000 square feet. But now, automobile manufacturers shamelessly advertise SUVs starting at $100,000. Smartphones go for $1500 a pop. Parents buy these for their children as if they're buying them a pair of shoes. Four-inch APO refractors are advertised at $5,000, without a tripod or mount! And kids - yes, kids! - are buying them!

And where are the kids today who don't know about the underground oceans on Enceladus, the Heart on Pluto, or what a Supermoon is? Kids these days grew up with the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. They get the latest-breaking astronomy news on their iPhones every minute of the day and night. They know all about the Big Bang, black holes, gravity waves, dark energy, and other mind-boggling astrophysics that I had never heard of as a kid. And point out Jupiter to them in the night sky? Bah! If they see a bright star up in the sky and wonder about it, all they do is hold up their iPhone and it tells them what it is.

Now that I've told you about the state of amateur astronomy in our times, it may surprise you to learn that there are still a lot of old amateur astronomers out there who think that they need to evangelize and help others get started on their own backyard astronomy journeys. They still think there are underprivileged children somewhere out there with no Internet access, who don't have the opportunity to look at Saturn's rings through a telescope. I'm baffled by this! From all indications (YouTube channels, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, television, etc.), there is no shortage of money in modern families. Not even the federal government has any pity for the poor these days. So apparently, the poor no longer exist. There is simply no longer a need to feel sorry for, evangelize, or offer our expertise to the next generation. They already have more than everything they need. 

It cracks me up when I read about amateur astronomers still promoting "outreach astronomy." It's a waste of time, as far as I'm concerned, and I make no apologies for my sentiments. Kids these days don't need crotchety old guys like me to show them how to do anything! I will only embarrass myself if I try. They already know more about astronomy and its technology than I do. They know more about everything than I do. And if they don't know something, they can Google it and instantly know exponentially more than I do about it. They are also not poor like I was when I was their age.

So, if you're an old dude like me who spent the last 40 years of your life enjoying backyard astronomy and have tried to share your enjoyment of it with others, stop wasting any more of your precious time on evangelism. Trust me: you needn't feel a single ounce of guilt while disrespecting John Dobson's outdated advice about letting everybody else look through your telescope. 

You can also disregard your antiquated notion that the professional astronomers need you for variable star observations and transient object discoveries or anything else. They now have sufficient survey instruments like Pan-STARRS, ZTF, ATLAS, GOTO, BlackGem, and now the amazing Vera Rubin Observatory that can find 2,000 previously undiscovered asteroids in three days. With all these facilities at their disposal, the professionals will find every supernova, asteroid, and comet either before you can, or within seconds after you do! Their data also includes the continuous nightly light curves of every variable star in the night sky. So, goodbye AAVSO. You can shutter your website. Thank you for your service!

But you and I, my friend, we have only a few years remaining to get the most out of our own intimacy with the night sky that we can. It's time to focus on our own interests and our own enjoyment of the heavens. Kids today are doing just fine without us, and they have their whole lives ahead of them to carry on their own research. 

And if kids these days haven't already done so, it won't be much longer until they conclude that we don't know anything anyway.