Loving astronomy

Researching a story this afternoon, I happened to look up Comet Arend-Roland, which passed near Earth in 1956 and 1957. That was the first such entity in my limited experience (I turned thirteen that year) – about two years after I got my first "real" telescope, a 4" Dynascope reflector.

Kids chart their growth with things. This or that doll or bike or, in my case, telescope. My great good fortune was that in the few years preceding this purchase, my mother had taught me how to play cutthroat poker – killing time with penny-ante while we waited in the car for my music lessons. I passed some of this skill on to the other neighborhood kids, to my considerable profit.

My parents didn't know that my growing bank account was mostly due to poker. I had a paper route and part interest in two others, so a lot of cash went through my hands. (In those days, paperboys collected cash from customers every month.) As Arend-Roland silently sailed through the outer solar system, my cash approached the magical sum of $100. For that amount I purchased an 8" f/8 Newtonian reflector, a solid hundred pounds of steel, from an amateur astronomer in Oklahoma. It was quite a large telescope for the time.

It was a good telescope for the planets and the moon. I had 12-mm. and 6-mm. eyepieces, giving me about 128X and a jittery 256X. Fortunately, I was curious about star clusters and nebulae, so I invested in the old A. Jaegers 2" Kellner eyepiece, which cranked the power down to a manageable 32X. Nothing like the wide-field marvels that amateurs have now, but it opened up a new universe to me.

And then, out of left field (Pisces, actually) along came Arend-Roland, and with the fat 2" eyepiece it really blazed forth. Kids would look at it and go home and pester their parents to come look at it, and the parents would go get their neighbors. The comet and I were sort of seven-day wonders.

I have to speculate now, more than a half-century later, how much that cometary passage changed my life. I might have stayed interested in astronomy without that dramatic week, but I don't know. It was a real game-changer for an awkward bookish kid. I went on to get my first degree in astronomy, and although I never worked in it beyond grad-school number-crunching, my love of astronomy translated into a career in science fiction writing and, eventually, a professorship at MIT. All from a ghostly dim circle floating through the night sky of Bethesda, Maryland. I wonder whether you could see it from there if it passed by today.

Joe Haldeman