I think my entry into astronomy was shaped more by fortuitous circumstance than by any kind of premeditation on my part. As a child, I had no idea what I wanted to do at all. My parents, as well as other people I knew, recognized that I was intellegent, but I was also enormously interested in baseball. I was a voracious reader of all kinds of books about history, science and just about anything else for that matter. I particularly recall having read George Gamows '1,2,3 Infinity' and Hoyle's 'Frontiers of Astronomy' in elementary or junior high school.
In high school I did OK in science and math, but also in english and the humanities. My grades were not, however, that great. These were the post-Sputnik years when spaceflight was becoming pretty important and the Mercury flights were major news every where. My grandmother lived in Florida and, I think, followed the space program very carefully. She encouraged me to study science and not attend a liberal arts college as I had thought of doing. When she died, we found that she had left money to me specifically to attend MIT . In my senior year while taking the college entrance exams, the scores told me that my grades and abilities were pretty wildly out of step with each other and I wound-up majoring in physics at MIT and working with Prof. Alan Barrett's group in atmospheric science and radio astronomy. After graduation, I got a summer position at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Like many other radio astronomers, I think that this was the single thing that most pointed me into astronomy.
As an astronomer, I am fascinated by the sky. I love the darkness, and when I am observing I feel very close to the sky. At Kitt Peak, I used to go outside and look up at the stars. I would often wonder if somewhere around one of those stars I was looking at, some creature at that very moment wasn't also looking up at their sky at the sun, and at me. I don't think so much of the "beauty" of the night sky as I do about its vastness and its sameness. I suppose that this is a "religeous experience", but religion doesn't grip me and fill me with consuming enthusiasm as a subject. Though I am not an athiest, religious dogma and explanations don't compel me or offer me much intellectual satisfaction when I contemplate the universe. As a group, I would be very much surprised if there were many atheist astronomers, but I would also be surprised to find fundamentalists among our ranks. We are all, I think, rather conservative and there are probably many 'lapsed' catholics and jews among us. Still, I thoroughly enjoy talking to people about religion, even to literal fundamentalists. It's exciting and fascinating, and is one of the few windows to the soul that we have available to us.