I had a small handheld telescope when I was a kid, but I never saw anything worth seeing, not even the moon (I suspect I only ever looked when it was full where I could see just the flat disk). I had no road map to figuring out how to learn about astronomy, didn’t even know there were likely guides at the library. And I didn’t know anyone to ask. Not surprisingly, my interest didn’t proceed very far.
However, in 2014, I bought my first real scope using inheritance money from my mother’s estate. It is a Celestron NexStar 8SE, one of the so-called GoTo Scopes, and I thought the heavens would open and all would be revealed automatically. Instead, I struggled with some setup issues for quite some time, and I read a LOT of other resources on the internet and in paper to figure out what I needed to know. But regularly, I found myself wanting a bit of “this book” and a bit from “that book”. Or that an article over there did a good job of explaining this bit.
From time to time, I would wade into deeper waters to try and answer someone’s question in an online forum based on what I had gleaned from others during my own quest to learn.… Read the rest
