Every moment spent under the stars is a treasure hunt – a visual journey that leads us to endless riches in the heavens above. And I've loved each adventure from the beginning. When I was young, perhaps age eight, I set out on one of my first deep-sky adventures – to hunt down the great globular cluster M13 in Hercules. I had seen a full-page photo of it in Planets, Stars, and Space (first published in 1957 by Creative Educational Society in cooperation with the American Museum of Natural History, New York), which my father kept on the lower shelf of a bookcase set up in the living room. The book's authors, Joseph Miles Chamberlain and Thomas D. Nicholson, described the cluster as a “huge ball of stars … so numerous that the center … resembled a brilliant mass of light.” My Golden Guide, The Sky Observer's Guide, went one step further, saying that this “globular may have 100,000 [stars].” It also said it may be seen with the naked eye.

It seemed incredible to me at the time that if I could first find the Keystone of Hercules among the multitude of stars overhead, I could then search for a citadel of 100,000 suns – one so distant and so tightly packed together (yet so bright) that I could see it with the naked eye as a hazy star.