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I caught the astronomy bug at an early age. It was right after my dinosaur-obsession & right before my car-obsession. Unfortunately, my interest in astronomy ended as abruptly as it began & on a very sour note. It took almost thirty years for me to decide to take it up again, & when I myself did it was hard to imagine waiting so long. Upon reflection, I realized I didnt just stop; I stopped out of anger & frustration. My mother confirmed this recalling that when I was about 8 years old, my father & I went out with my little telescope for the first time. A ½ hour later when we came back in I wanted nothing more to do with it & wouldnt even talk about it! Its very easy to get a child interested in astronomy but its even easier for them to get frustrated & quit. Ive come up with four suggestions that I feel may help you avoid the pitfalls I experienced & inspire your future scientist to take up the amazing hobby of astronomy & enjoy it for a lifetime!

First, you dont need a telescope for an astronomy hobby. You heard that right! The very best way to start out is by learning about what youre looking at. And you dont need any equipment to do it… Get a book on constellations, sit down with your future astronomer (during the day), & start with the constellations that are visible for that time of year. Learn to identify the patterns, associate them with their names, and read the stories behind the historical characters they’re named after. Kids have amazing memories & are fantastic at learning patterns & associating the names with them. Perfect for constellations! Check out science kits, science toys, and Janice VanCleave science experiment books, they are a great way to get started. After your child has become familiar with & can identify some of the constellations in the book, wait for a dark clear night, lie out on a blanket, and identify as many as you can. It will be so much fun you’ll count the days until the next time you go stargazing!

Now lets talk about what you can & can not see. The moon is amazing to look at through either binoculars or a telescope, but its bright so make certain you have a moon filter so you dont hurt your eyes! A moon filter is like wearing sunglasses, it reduces the amount of light entering your eye(s). And dont observe the moon when its full, its too washed out. OK. Shadows bring out details in craters & other landscape features. Meteor showers are fun & there’re schedules that will tell you when & where to look for them. Constellations are easy to see with the naked eye, but attempt to go out during a new moon (also called a dark moon) or close to it… The brighter the moon the harder it’s to see celestial objects. Right. With binoculars you’ll be easily able to see many open clusters & globular clusters, quite beautiful! With a low powered telescope youll be easily able to see both types of clusters, some double stars, and a few nebulae. You may also get to see Jupiter & Saturn. The only galaxy you should expect to see is Andromeda (M31), the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way. Unless you live under very dark skies & have a big telescope, galaxies are just too faint & too far away to see. Even Andromeda will look like a faint fuzzy in most parts of the country.

This leads right into my second postulate. Objects seen through a telescope rarely look like the clear, colorful, large photos you see. The human eye is unable to see the color that can be picked up by a camera. Therefore, a nebula that shows up in photos with wonderful reds & purples, and sticks out in sharp contrast to neighboring stars will look gray, faint, and ghostly through your telescope. And thats if you can see it at all. Jupiter will show some color, but the image will be very small in your eyepiece & making out details will be difficult… Im not saying the objects you see will be disappointing, quite the contrary. But if expectations are set too high for a child, the let-down can be damaging. Learning about the objects first will make them much more interesting to observe.

Lets take the following example: Imagine looking at a globular cluster (personally, my favorite object in the sky). Looks pretty amazing through your telescope, believe me. But look at it again knowing its M-13 or Messier 13, the Hercules Cluster, the best globular cluster north of the celestial equator. This is a naked eye object under very dark skies with 500,000 stars extending 150 light years across & a distance of 26,000 light years from Earth. Discovered by Edmond Halley (of Halleys Comet) in 1714. While Messier never saw its individual stars, even a small telescope brings out the details in this magnificent mass of stars. This globular cluster is about 14 billion years old! Three dark rifts radiate outward from near the center, like a dark propeller. M-13 is located in the constellation Hercules, son of Zeus, the hero who was made to perform twelve great tasks to cleanse himself after he went temporarily insane, killing his wife & children. Even if your child cant grasp all the concepts, do you see how the constellation & the objects now have life?

Third, (as Ive previously mentioned) you need to manage a childs expectations. Clear? If they expect to see a big, bright, colorful object, and they end up having to struggle to see a bland, blurry one that takes you a long time to find, they will get frustrated & lose interest. Kids have big imaginations as we can see by the cartoons they watch. Their world is big, loud, & colorful & their attention span is short. It also depends on what age your child is. The Janice VanCleave science experiment books are for kids 8 years & older, & thats probably a good age to start them with a telescope. They may be interested in constellations at an earlier age but when it comes time to look at things through the telescope its a little tougher. Astronomy can be a slow & deliberate hobby, with beauty in the very subtle details of the objects. As a parent you need to decide when to start your child in this fantastic hobby. If they have become interested, teach them as much as they can soak up!

And fourth, when you’re ready to buy a telescope, dont buy a cheap piece of junk! Now let me tell you how I really feel.  You dont need to spend a lot of money, but purchasing an inferior scope is a recipe for disaster. Walking through department stores youll notice the no-name brand telescopes being sold that advertise 400x power (sounds good, right?) & show beautiful large color pictures of heavenly objects on the box. As weve discussed, you wont be seeing those objects on the box the way they’re shown, but its a nice marketing tool. Cheap telescopes dont focus well & 400 power just blurs images. A low power scope with quality optics is the best way to go, & they’re inexpensive. A great source on the web is Science Store for the Stars for telescopes & Janice VanCleave science books.

Years after I put my telescope into storage, I got it out again & took it apart to see what was inside. The primary mirror was basically a piece of tin foil that reflected the little bit of light it could muster onto a small mirror that looked just like the hand mirror a dentist puts into your mouth. It was a complete piece of junk! It never focused or showed anything in detail. Even the moon was blurry. No wonder I angrily quit the hobby! Of course there was no way for my parents to know, & how would you?

Very briefly lets talk about telescopes. The purpose of a telescope is to first, capture light with the primary mirror or refracting lens(s), & second, to focus it (with an eyepiece) into a clear & sharp image. The eyepieces are what give you different powers (also called magnifications). One lesson I learned rather rapidly was that you dont need an expensive, large, and powerful scope to see some of the best objects in the sky. But you do need a quality telescope. There are many different designs of telescopes, but there’re really only 2 types; refractors & reflectors. Refractor telescopes use lenses like binoculars to refract or bend the light coming in. Reflectors, on the other hand, use a primary mirror which reflects light to a smaller secondary mirror, then through an eyepiece (a lens) before it gets to your eye. There are many different kinds of reflectors including the Dobsonian, SCT or Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope, Maksutov-Cassegrain, Newtonian reflectors, Ritchey-Chretien, & others. Right. We wont get into the specifics of these, but the different types of reflectors all basically work the same way; by reflecting light.

If you start by learning about the constellations & other celestial objects & manage your childs expectations, they will appreciate what they see. And so… So far so good. When it comes time to buy a telescope, do your research! There’re plenty of inexpensive telescopes with quality optics out there. Try Science Store for the Stars for great starter scopes by Smithsonian & Educational Insights. Both are affordable with high quality optics. They also have Janice VanCleave science books on astronomy & constellations. Clear? If you follow these guidelines, you & your young astronomer will enjoy the hobby of astronomy for a lifetime!

Copyright Thomas J Ryan - Science Store for the Stars 2007

By: BamaCat

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BamaCat

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