I think I was 7 or 8 when I started begging my parents for a telescope. I couldn't even find my way around the night sky yet, and I wasn't sure how a telescope was going to help, but I knew I needed one.
I was 9 or 10, and I had been staring at star-charts for literally years, but had never been able to make the scattering of stars I could see in the sky quite align with those charts. I loved the stars, and I knew their names.... but not their faces.
I'll never forget the winter night when the boy-me was looking up and trying to find a landmark in the sky.... any landmark, some place from which I might begin to find my way... and there it was. It was a cold, crystal-clear night, and that unmistakable pattern of stars from my books was right there above me: Orion, enormous and blazing, floating over my backyard.
I saved every penny for a scope, but never quite seemed to have enough. On my 11th birthday, my grandfather took mercy on me and gave me the rest of the money I needed to buy my first telescope. It was a cheap Tasco refractor with about a 60mm objective lens up front. It was, in retrospect, a cheap toy, but when I looked through it night after night and watched those four distinctive dots around Jupiter dance, I felt like Galileo.
Since then I have had the good fortune to, at various times in my life, either own or have access to Very Serious Telescopes. I'm one of those very lucky folks who has spent a life-time looking at all the the big "showboat" objects in the night sky through extraordinary instruments. The finest instrument I ever owned was a 20" Newtonian reflector on a big, smooth, perfectly balanced Dobsonian mount. I don't have it anymore, but it's in good hands, and it sits now in a permanent observatory on a mountain in Southern Oregon, well cared for and well loved.
These days I have an inexpensive but trusty little 120mm "wide-field" refractor. The optics are nothing special, and the chromatic aberration is pretty excessive, but I can toss it up in the driveway or take it a couple hundreds yards down my dirt road, and get a look at my old friends from time to time.
Tonight just at sunset, I drove a few hundred yards up my dirt road to a place that has a magnificent view to the west, tossed up the telescope, and pointed it at the diamond that was glittering just above the horizon.
Jupiter, its four Galilean moons, and Saturn and her rings, all in one field of view. I couldn't even have imagined such a sight when I was a boy.
Whatever echo of the 11 year old boy with his first telescope yet survives in me is still in awe.
