Introduction

My name is Tom Leith, and while I'm starting this blog at the outset of an introductory Astronomy course at Harvard, I could just as easily have started it five years ago--or even longer. I've loved outer space since I was a little kid, and instead of getting over that fascination like most sane people, I only became more and more interested as I grew older. The moment my house had a functional internet connection, my parents noticed that Space.com and NASA.gov had sprung up in their bookmarks, joined a short time later by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (my background is an old Astronomy Picture of the Day, originally located here). I grew up in a house about a block away from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and began religiously attending that institution's monthly Observatory Night public lectures--which were followed by stargazing through telescopes on the building's roof.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't remember what the first lecture I attended was about, but I was fortunate to be attending on a clear night, and I vividly remember the stargazing that followed. There was, as always, a big crowd, which meant that you were fortunate to get more than a few seconds on any of the few telescopes that were set up. Which was a shame, because Saturn was up, and I honestly think I could look at Saturn for hours. I felt an almost electric jolt seeing it for the first time--I'd seen thousands of pictures of it before, but I just couldn't believe that I could look through a telescope and just see it hanging there looking like that. Phil Plait, a science and astronomy blogger at Slate.com, wrote a great article not too long ago called "Opening the Sky to Everyone." I am, astonishingly, not a prostitute from the Bronx (the subjects of the article are), but what he had to say--about getting people to look up and the effect that having a chance to look at the sky through a telescope can have--resonated with me, and reminded me of that first look I had through a telescope at Saturn.

Five years ago my grandfather, Bill Leith, died. He was, among other things, an avid amateur astronomer, and I had always wanted to spend a night stargazing with him at my grandparents' house in rural Vermont. One of his most prized posessons was a beautiful Questar 3.5" reflector, which was as eager to share with me--the only one of his grandchildren to have inherited his interest--as I was to use it. Unfortunately, we never got the chance to. But after his death, the telescope found its way into my hands, and at 2:30 am on a brutally cold February night in high school I clambered through a skylight onto my parents' roof and pulled the telescope and its tripod after me. I had thus far done little more than flip through the manual and examine the telescope, and what followed was what seemed like an hour of trying to get the tripod set up, the telescope mounted on it, and figure out where all the knobs and levers to focus the telescope, switch back and forth from finder mode, and engage the Barlow lens belonged. Remarkably, with just an old red flashlight to examine the manual by, I figured it out. Even more remarkably, I didn't get frostbite. It was the first of many nights I spent using the telescope, both in the city and wherever I could find a dark sky.

This is definitely a longer introduction than I was planning to write, and probably longer than most folks will have the patience to read, but I think it informs in a very real way why I'm studying Astronomy now that I'm in college. I never had the chance to in high school, at least not in a formal way, and the idea that I could center an academic experience around what has always been very special to me is an exciting one. I'm not great at math, and I'm far worse still at physics. Those things worry me (a lot, considering that I have at least two more pure physics courses to go as an undergrad), but I've begun to see them as tools that I do have the persistence, if not the raw intelligence, to grasp in order to better understand a subject matter that has fascinated me my entire life. My hope for Astronomy 16 is not only that I will be a better and better-informed amateur astronomer--as much as I've emphasized my own observing here, it's really only one side of the coin. More than anything, I think I simply want to gain insight into what's out there, by accumulating raw information itself and even more so by assembling the toolkit to take that information, put it in context, and be able to turn it into real understanding.