“The night sky has been calling since third grade. I’m finally answering.”
My third-grade teacher changed my life. I don’t think she ever knew it.
Mrs. Weigle had a gift for making science feel like an adventure. Through a series of field trips she instilled in me a love of science that has never left. The most important of those trips was to the Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory — one of the oldest observatories in the South, sitting on a hill above Nashville. I don’t remember exactly what I saw when I looked through that 24-inch telescope. But whatever it was, the hook was set.
Three years later I was at a Boy Scout camp in Michigan. On an overnight hike we stopped to rest, dropped our packs, and laid down on the ground. Looking straight up into a completely dark sky I saw the Milky Way for the first time — all of it, edge to edge, more stars than I had ever imagined existed.
If the Dyer Observatory set the hook, that Michigan sky reeled me in.
Seven years ago I went back to the Dyer Observatory with my granddaughter and her parents. She looked through the same eyepiece I had looked through more than sixty years earlier. I watched her face when she saw what was on the other side of that lens — and I remembered exactly what that felt like. Some things are worth passing on.
That three-generation moment at the eyepiece is exactly what this section is about — even when Saturn refuses to cooperate.
A Lifelong Love Affair With the Sky
Ever since elementary school I have loved looking at the night sky and just taking in the sheer magnitude of space. Over the years I visited planetariums from the Adler in Chicago — one of the world’s largest — down to a tent planetarium a teacher set up for an elementary school evening sky show. At the Adler I saw display images of famous nebulae for the first time. I didn’t know what a nebula was. The beauty of those images captured my imagination in a way I’ve never quite shaken.
My parents were longtime subscribers to National Geographic, which often ran articles on the cosmos. I remember one particular issue with a map insert that expanded outward — from our solar system, to the Milky Way, to our local group of galaxies, all the way out to the observable universe. That was the first time I began to grasp just how large everything really is. It was humbling then. It still is.
Life got in the way of learning more about astronomy for a long time. Career, family, twelve houses in eight states — the night sky was always there, but serious study kept getting postponed. Now that I’ve retired, I intend to make up for lost time.
The Plan
My plan is to use a Celestron NexStar 5SE telescope, an inexpensive CCD camera — around $200 — and a free piece of software called SharpCap to do all my observing on a computer monitor rather than standing on my head trying to see through an eyepiece at an awkward angle in the dark. I’m also using AI to help me learn — specifically to build a training plan for SharpCap and troubleshoot problems as they come up. If that surprises you, wait until you read the Golf section.
One more thing worth saying up front: I am consciously not going to dark sky sites right now. That would be wonderful, but I want to find out what is actually visible from a suburban driveway with an affordable telescope in a light-polluted environment. I suspect there are plenty of other people who would like to know the same thing.
This section is for them too.
What’s Coming
Here’s where the posts in this section are headed — in roughly the order things actually happened, which is also roughly the order of my mistakes:
- The Christmas Telescope — it arrived. I had no idea what I was doing.
- The Battery Problem — turns out the stars don’t care if you’re prepared
- The Shaking Problem — apparently the ground moves. Who knew.
- The Solar Eclipse Watch Party — one thing actually worked, and I’m taking full credit
- Meet SharpCap — I stopped squinting through the eyepiece and let the computer do it
- The First Night With SharpCap — encouraging. Which is a low bar, but I’ll take it.
- The Night I Found Saturn — sixty years after the Dyer Observatory. Worth the wait.
Each of these posts documents a real step in a real learning process — including the steps that didn’t work. When I eventually have a system that works reliably from a suburban driveway, I’ll make the full plan available here for anyone who wants to follow the same path. No dark sky site required.
If you’ve ever stood under a dark sky and felt genuinely small — or if you have a telescope sitting in your closet collecting dust because you couldn’t figure it out — you already understand what this section is about. Pull up a lawn chair. We’re going to figure it out together.
Grace and Peace —
Scott Walker