Preface

When I was 14, I fell in love with the universe. The discovery occurred with a one-time view of Saturn through a telescope at a local “star party.” There was something so calm and comforting about gazing skyward at the twinkling dots spread across an inky black cosmos. Somewhere amid all the apparent serenity out in the universe things must be incredibly more complicated than they were for an earthbound kid. So in the cool spring of America’s Bicentennial year, I found a new habit: taking my family’s pair of 7×50 binoculars, grabbing a sleeping bag, and, with my dog in tow, wandering out from the edge of our neighborhood into a cornfield and lying down, taking long stares at the star fields and glows of the Milky Way above the southern Ohio landscape.

The sessions went from a few minutes at first, to hours after a couple of weeks. I might as well have been on the Moon; civilization was shielded, the neighborhood tucked away behind a low screen of trees, the sky fortunately dark, and my only companions Oscar the border collie, the occasional rustle of a squirrel or raccoon, and the deep beauty of the sky above. As Earth slowly rotated, I saw the universe’s whole show – as far as we can see it from our place in the cosmos. Gradually, I learned constellations, recognized bright stars as my friends, and squinted toward the positions of fuzzy objects I couldn’t quite make out – clusters of stars and glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way Galaxy – as seen through the old binoculars. Before I knew it, I had been taken into another world. I didn’t know exactly why I’d gone, except that this world was alluring for the mystery and the grandeur of the vastness of space.