My 'space obsessed' bedroom in Oakland California ca 1968 had pictures of galaxies and nebula on every wall, and stacks of science fiction novels overflowing the book shelves. I also shared this 12x12-foot room with two large telescopes! The large moon map sported marks for each of the Apollo, Ranger and Surveyor landing sites. It replaced an equally large wall map of the United States where I had carefully labeled all of the places where UFOs had been sighted between 1940 - 1965!

The Grade School Years I have always been afraid of the dark. Nothing fills me with greater dread than walking into a dark room even in my own house. In spite of this, my fascination with the night sky began when I was quite young. Against a backdrop of insect collections, home made radios and an insatiable appetite for ancient Egyptian history, my own awakening interest in the sky is actually one of the few formative events in my childhood that I can pin-point quite accurately. It was the fall of 1963 and I was preparing to enter 5th grade; at this time a new TV program was premiering: The Outer Limits. The first episode, called The Galaxy Being featured a dabbler in electronics who had built a powerful TV transmitter and makes contact with a being from the Andromeda galaxy. When the closing credits started to roll across the TV screen, instead of background stills from the episode, I was treated to glorious photographs of galaxies and nebulae. I couldn't wait to get back to school the next day and find all the books I could on these strange looking objects. Soon I understood the difference between a galaxy, a nebula and a star cluster and could even identify some of the 'classic' examples of these that frequently appeared as pictures in books. I knew their distances and which constellations they were in, just as I had memorized the vital statistics for my favorite dinosaurs when I was much younger.

I also spent Saturday afternoons at the library, photocopying at five cents a shot, all the galaxies I could find illustrations for. Just like some boys collect baseball cards with their allowances, each nickel I got from mowing lawns and scrounging for soda bottles was quickly turned into a new galaxy for my collection. By the time Christmas came around, the binoculars my Dad had given me in November were replaced by a shiny new 3" reflecting telescope and a whole new round of space exploration began, this time with a completely different set of questions to answer for myself: Are stars really pinpoints of light even at the highest magnification? What do the Great Nebula in Orion and the moons of Jupiter really look like? The night sky in a city like Oakland hides much of what the universe has to offer. My first sight of the unclouded heavens while at a Boy Scout summer camp in Yosemite was at once exhilarating and confusing. The Milky Way sliced the heavens with its bright clumpy countenance. There were stars everywhere you looked in uncountable multitudes. The shock was soon replaced by excitement as I recognized old familiar constellations. I eventually built two telescopes, and with a camera, assembled my own collection of constellations, planets and nebulae.