Why I wanted to become an astronomer

I can't believe I haven't told this story yet.

This is the story of how I got interested in astronomy and managed to will myself somewhat far down the professional path.

There were three primary influences: a man, books, and television.

The man:

I think I was about six when I met Uncle Kimo, a cousin-in-law-in-law. (My aunt married a man who had a sister who married Uncle Kimo.)  At the time, Uncle Kimo worked at JPL as an instrumentation engineer. I really liked "Uncle Kimo". He seemed to know a lot of things! We spent time drawing maps of continents and he would tell me about space. Over the years, he sent me some of those nice high-gloss photos from Voyager and other space missions. Some of my personal favorites were a radio reconstruction of Venus' surface, Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, black and white images of Uranus' satellites, and that stunning deep blue shot of Neptune and the Great Dark Spot, accented by some bright white storms (the largest called "Scooter", if memory serves).





I think I loved Uncle Kimo not just because of the cool space stuff. He was maybe the first male family member I really felt comfortable around. My dad was crazy and unstable; my uncles either scared me because of their anger or were just not that interesting/good with kids. I loved my grandpa, but he was intimidating (especially to everyone older than me), and the language barrier made us not quite as close as we might have been.

Also worth emphasizing: Uncle Kimo was the first adult who really tried to teach me about the world around me, and do it in a way that didn't assume I was just a dumb kid.

I only saw Uncle Kimo a few times growing up, but I'd still place him as a tremendous influence on my life in general, and my interest in astronomy in particular.

Books:

I spent a lot of time alone growing up. My parents divorced when I was three. My mother worked, and so my grandparents played a large role in raising me. They were kind and loving, but didn't speak much English, so I ended up turning to books. My mom says I initially hated to read, and would slam my little hand down on any book she tried to open and read to me. Maybe I was creeped out by Shel Silverstein's artwork in Where the Sidewalk Ends. But, eventually, I did start reading on my own.


As a society, are we still ok with this?


One of the first books I got was The Golden Book of Stars and Planets.

I read it probably a couple hundred times. I loved the artist's depictions (all images of the planets were hand-drawn).

I still remember it mentioning NGC 5128 (depicted on the cover, right side), thinking "That's a weird name for a galaxy. Why wasn't it called something like the Milky Way? Or Snickers?" (It's a radio source, and got special mention, though I thought it made weird sounds because the artist's depiction made it look like it was surrounded by hair.)

I also went through a weird phase as a kid in which questions in a book would freak me out. They scared me! Because of that, I'd have to skip over the last part of the Mars section? "Was there ever water on Mars? Could there have been life?" It was that and an earthquake preparedness pamphlet that creeped me out with those "?", which I must have mentally read in some sort of spooky voice. (Did anyone else have this, or was this a leading indicator for profound mental unsoundness? -- again, with scary questions!)

I loved that book so much.

More books. Remember Scholastic catalogs? Or Arrow? Or the other one? Classroom teachers would give us these catalogs filled with books that we could buy at (what I thought were) reasonable prices. Now, I didn't know how money worked, even though I loved Scrooge McDuck in Ducktales and tried to swim in a pile of dimes in my grandparent's living room. (Maybe another flag that this boy ain't right.) I remember that in first grade everyone wrote a letter to President George H. W. Bush. I wrote that the process of making change (money, not policy) seemed unfair -- why does someone get to keep more of the money? My teacher helped me write it, but I'm a bit annoyed she didn't try to sit down and explain it to me at the time. I got a photo back, but I don't think the letter had an answer.

Also, in retrospect, this was one place where economic differences started to show. A lot of my classmates probably couldn't afford any books. I always got to pick a few, as well as get a subscription to Highlights! magazine.



Goofus generally gets what he wants, even if he is an asshole. Gallant is a spineless appeaser and a fake, pretentious prick. Guess who I grew up to be?

One of the books I got this way was Planets: A Golden Guide to the Solar System.

This was not my favorite book. I don't know why -- I carried it around everywhere. It just seemed not as exciting, or less accessible because of more data. There were tables of numbers, I think, and maybe fewer dramatic, page-filling images.

I got a more important book that had both dramatic pictures and tons of numbers (though not derivations) around first or second grade. My Sunday School teacher gave me his old college astronomy textbook, a paperback that cost $34.75 at the Aschula's student store. (I still remember the sticker on the cover.) The book was Essentials of the Dynamic Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, Second Edition by Theodore P. Snow. Sadly, I can't track down the cover image, but it must have been a saturated image of a star, or an AGN, or something like that, with some rainbow accents suggesting spectra.

I think I read that book cover to cover several times. This was the source of nearly all of my knowledge of  introductory astronomy. Memory being what it is, those early memories were retained much more easily than ones in college, making it sometimes challenging to rewrite my knowledge of certain important constants. (The distance light traveled in a second was, in my mind, 186,282 miles, and not 299,792 kilometers. Mercury orbited the Sun at a distance of 38 million miles -- and unfortunately all my distance scales inside the Solar System remain imperial.)

Same church: our rather conservative junior minister occasionally called on me, possibly for comedic effect, to quote some astronomical fact -- closest star, distance to the Sun, etc. -- that had some tie-in to his sermon.

Years later, after being accepted at CU Boulder's astronomy grad program, I happened to meet with Theodore P. Snow. (I think he went by Ted at the time.) Usually, meetings were about prospective research, but I spent the entire time as a fanboy gushing about how incredibly important his textbook was to my life. I have no idea whether it was flattering or scary for him, but I was thrilled to put a name to a face. (It also helped that he seemed nice -- read: Not A Professor Asshole.)

This book and interactions with that pastor explain why I never, ever thought of a conflict between science and religion until I started paying attention to politics/went to college. I still think it's misguided/overrated.

Books were a good substitute for technology. I was lucky enough to get a small telescope for Christmas, but quite frankly, it was a piece of crap Celestron. I probably should have read the manual more carefully, but none of us really took the time to figure out how to use the RA and DEC wheels, or how to use coordinates to find things in the sky. Oh, and perhaps most importantly, I couldn't see jack shit because I was too close to Los Angeles. Saturn's rings and the Galilean satellites were nice to see, but a bit anticlimactic after spending years staring at NASA images.

Television

As a kid, I watched a ton of TV, unsupervised. I remember being confused as to why "Orchie Bunkur" was so angry all the time. (This is a reference to All in the Family.) I even wrote a letter to that effect, to no one in particular. (I liked writing letters as a kid.) This letter was proudly placed in my grandpa's scrapbook without further comment, a testament to both his love and the complete absence of analytic evaluation of child behavior in my family.

I watched a lot of Star Trek: TNG. Remember that it ran from 1987-1994. From the age of four to eleven, I saw brand-new TNG episodes. I saw the very first airing of "The Best of Both Worlds". Eat your hearts out, young nerds.

I would record a lot of these episodes and re-watch them endlessly (VHS, in case the young people are curious). I didn't have particularly good taste -- I recorded as much as I could, and ended up with a skewed impression of the overall series, with Data being held up by Samuel Clemens with a .45 revolver playing a more important role than, say, "The Inner Light" or "Darmok". More fortunately, I also recorded and watched "Chain of Command", though maybe even scrubbed and tidied torture scenes weren't the best thing for a young child to process.

I also watched Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Again, I had no taste -- I thought Babylon 5 was an incredibly well-acted show and ST: DS9 weak by comparison (I would reverse those judgments years later.)

But in addition to sci-fi, I watched some sci-fact. NOVA specials were great, and what I know of cosmology comes from them.

The most personally important program, however, was a National Geographic documentary titled Asteroids: Deadly Impact. It primarily focused on Gene Shoemaker and his study of asteroid and comet impacts. Of course, no one man or team can claim sole ownership of such a broad field, but it made for great watching.

Only the intro is available for free online: Asteroids Deadly Impact

Again, I recorded this, and watched in at least 50 times. I returned to it a few times in high school, especially when I had an abysmally poor physics teacher, to sort of remind me why I thought astronomy was worth studying.

Epilogue:

These influences were critical. I enjoyed reading books. I had a person who cared about me, and encouraged my interest. Even my religious authority figures fed this interest in astronomy.

I didn't really know what astronomers do until later, and in retrospect, I probably should have looked into it a bit more before embarking on a professional path.

But in some ways I was more successful than I should have been. How many of us dreamed of being a paleontologist as a kid? Or a marine biologist? At some point, most of us revise those dreams -- ideally because we discover other interests, but often because the impracticality of our dreams are beat out of us by parents, teachers, or others.

When I was about four, I said I wanted to be a pediatrician, probably because my pediatrician, Dr. Nakashima, was a hilarious and awesome guy who claimed to be a ninja turtle, and maintained that despite my challenges. But my mom's asshole friend said that that wasn't a good idea, and I never, ever considered being a medical doctor, even though, in retrospect, I probably would have been a good one.

I was lucky, in some sense. I was lucky to have enough resources and opportunities to follow my dreams without reality intruding. Sure, it was unfocused and overly idealistic. Sure, I hit points when the contradiction between what I felt were my skills and interests diverged from what I appeared to be doing. And yes, it ended pretty badly, and I'm still recovering from poor choices I made.

But I got away with it for a hell of a long time, partly because I was good enough at math and science to do it, but partly because I had just wanted it so badly and didn't know "better" not to irrationally pursue what should have been a more deliberate, cautious, and considered course of action.

Maybe I shouldn't think that I failed spectacularly. Maybe I should instead be grateful that I got away with it for so long.