How I Became an Astronomer

 When did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? Some of you have, perhaps, still not decided, even though you may have been working and earning a living for years or even decades. I knew from a very young age I wanted to be an astronomer.

Even as a child, of 6 years old, I’d go outside with my father at night to look through his telescope. I looked through his copies of “Sky and Telescope” magazines. Even though I rarely understood the articles, I loved looking at the pictures. I started telling everyone in first grade I wanted to be an astronomer. I still have a framed letter that my Mother saved for me in which I asked Santa Claus for a telescope for Christmas.

Something I saw in those old astronomy magazines really solidified that dream for me. Let me see if I can make you understand some of that excitement I felt back then.

Go outside tonight after dark and look up at the night sky. This time of year, the Milky Way, our home galaxy, lies along the horizon. So when you look up at the sky at 10:00, you’re looking out into the universe. Of course, all the stars you see are still part of our galaxy. But, from a dark location, you can see several faint fuzzy spots through an amateur telescope, or even a good pair of binoculars.

Look at the star chart and find the constellations of Virgo, Bootes, Leo, and Coma Berenices. Coma is a small, faint constellation between Bootes and Leo. On those old star charts in the magazine, this region was labeled as the “Realm of the Galaxies.” To my young mind, the Realm of the Galaxies was a magical, mystical location, a place where I connected to the universe!

Because you are essentially looking away from the Milky Way, other galaxies can be easily seen, many millions through the Hubble and Webb space telescopes. But even in my dad’s small, backyard telescope, we could see about half a dozen, more if we went to a really dark location.

I knew they would not look like the amazing photos I saw in the magazine that were taken through large telescopes with high-quality cameras, but I could see them myself! I was visiting the Realm of the Galaxies! I imagined flying through space in my personal rocket ship passing astronomical wonder after wonder. That’s when I knew I wanted to become an astronomer, to learn about everything in the universe, a universe made more real in the Realm of the Galaxies.

A few of the galaxies located in the "Realm of the Galaxies." 

From top to bottom: Messier 65 in Leo, Messier 100 in Coma Berenices, and Messier 61 in Virgo. All credit NASA.

Grown-up me still gets a thrill looking at and studying all those inhabitants of the astronomical zoo. My area of study in college was cosmology, the formation and evolution of the universe as a whole. To this day, I still feel a strong emotional connection to the feeling of looking through a small, backyard telescope at that part of the sky.