Interest in science hit me when I was about 10 years old. I was in our local hospital for the night with a broken leg and my 4th grade teacher brought me a book. I had a major crush on her so while the book didn’t seem all that interesting, I took it enthusiastically. That book changed the vector of my life, even though I tried my best many times to deny it. The book, The Atom.
The Atom showed me how stars worked, and I fell in love with astronomy.
The summer before 7th grade my family moved to another town. I made friends with a few other budding astronomers, and we started a club. A problem with small towns (ours had a population of around 8,000), there weren’t many kids interested in astronomy. We had, as I recall, 5 or 6 members. Even with the US space program ramping up, kids just had other interests…sports, band, band, sports. Science just seemed nerdy, geeky, bookish – too much like schoolwork – torture! Why would any kid in their right mind want to, choose to, study astronomy and then schlep an ungainly piece of equipment out at night, just to look at the sky?!!!
Fortunately for me some of my nerdy friends had a telescope, I did not. Our skies were exceptional too, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan – nearly zero light pollution. That combination made for many excited nights at the eyepiece of small telescopes, even in the cold and snow of winter.
How goes it today? There are way more activities available, and no additional hours. Kids are so much busier! Our local night sky isn’t what it once was. Also, the concept of observational astronomy is dated. Why, as my friends and I did, wrestle with equipment when we can sit at our computer and call up live views whenever we want?
Do any of you reading this column know of students interested in astronomy? Are you a student or teacher yourself?
We of the New Braunfels Astronomy Club are reaching out to you, WE WANT YOU!
Please contact us – our website: www.astronomynbtx.org
our email: admin@astronomynbtx.org
Our aim is to help in any way we can find and encourage young astronomers.
This is not just a ruse to get help with our website, our computers, or how to install apps.
What’s in the Sky?
Go out after 9pm CDT, look to the southeast. Scorpius, yes, the scorpion is just above the horizon.
Scorpius (Scorpio in astrology) has a heart of gold, OK, it’s orangish Antares. Antares is Greek meaning against or not Ares (Mars). It looks like Mars but isn’t. It’s a type M red supergiant star, 550 light years from us. Put it in place of the Sun and its edge gets past the orbit of Mars – big!
Look at Antares with binoculars. It has a cool, but dim companion, and a second, dimmer one. Globular cluster M4 (Crab Globular Cluster), is 7176 light years away. At 29032 light years away and harder to see is another globular cluster, NGC 6144.