Hans Rey became enamored with the night skies as a soldier in World War I and later bought a telescope. His maps made it much easier to learn the star patterns, and I memorized the ones I could view at 41 degrees north, from my childhood home. For example, Rey made Hercules look like a man holding a club, Aquarius-a man pouring water, and Pegasus shaped like a flying horse. Before his book, the imaginary lines that connected the stars did not resemble the constellations. The book was revolutionary in that Hans Rey redrew the connecting lines to the stars in each constellation to look like a mythical human, animal or scientific instrument associated with the star pattern. Rey’s book, The Stars: A New Way to See Them. The moth flying to the moon in Doctor Doolittle lit my imagination, as did Star Trek. Soon thereafter, I used binoculars to search for the brightest galaxies, star clusters and gas clouds. I eagerly studied the basic sky maps in the book and lay out in the yard learning the constellations. Maybe it was the colorfully painted Saturn, or the comet, or the river of the Milky Way on the cover that attracted me. But it all began with The Golden Guide to the Stars when I was five. ![]() I was fifteen when I received the red Edmund Scientific table-top telescope for Christmas. I ponder what it would be like to stand on a new planet gazing up at bright red and blue gas clouds in the alien sky. Ethereal gas swirls and dances with four young stars shimmering from within the cloud. I turn my telescope to the Orion Nebula, a bright stellar nursery. The planet is shrouded in clouds, in the sickle shape of the crescent phase of the evening star. I point my new two-inch aperture telescope at Venus for the first time. ![]() Try to take in the vastness of the universe.īundled in a snow-suit, I am lost in the twilight sky as the familiar star patterns emerge. Do not look at stars as bright spots only.
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