Tom Jonard, Young Astronomer

Having been a sailor in World War II dad had seen really dark skies and appreciated the connection of the stars to navigation.  He taught me why the moon had phases using a bare light bulb sun and an orange moon held at arm’s length.  He bought my first telescope, a 50 mm refractor in which Jupiter was a tiny dot and Saturn smaller still.  But Saturn had RINGS!  (Jupiter may have had moons back then too but I don’t remember.  Probably dad was not aware of the interesting phenomenon – eclipses, occultations and transits -- of Jupiter’s moons.)  We tried to mount this small scope in the copula on the garage only to find that the rafters were too springy to be a stable platform.  We settled for a clothes pole in the backyard.

Dad also bought my second telescope, a 4-1/4 inch scope from Edmund Scientific (the Palomar Jr. with blue dust covers) when I was about 15.  My grandpa built a case for it.  I wanted the 6 inch but my dad was unsure I had the bug bad enough to really use it.  And besides it was $125 vs. the $99 for the 4-1/4 inch.  This was my first real telescope.  It arrived via rail and we had to go to the rail freight terminal downtown and to pick it up one evening, which was a small adventure in itself.  The mount was heavy and undriven (I now think of a drive as a necessity).  The 1 inch eyepiece was a serviceable Kellner but the ½ inch “high power” eyepiece was a Ramsden with insufficient eye relief.  I would set this scope up in the backyard and observe what I could find by myself but lacked a good guide.  The scope itself and the Kellner eyepiece are still in service with me today.  So is the case.

Using the scope was more of a do-it myself project.  I would go out in the back yard and set it up and look for stuff.  I got a Mag-5 atlas from Edmond Scientific and looked for things like the Ring Nebula (it was small and faint).  The mount was frustrating because it did not dampen vibration well and each focus adjustment and shift to follow objects as the earth turned was followed by a wait for the shaking to stop.  The ½ inch Ramsden was almost unusable because of this and because it’s short eye relief caused you to accidentally bump the scope a lot.  But I learned some science.  I learned how to measure the size of the true and apparent fields of the telescope.  I learned how to measure the position of the planets by comparing readings from the crude setting circles for them and fixed stars and compensating for the time.

I built observing locations in the backyard with brick tripod position pads to mark where to put the scope legs so it pointed true North.  I observed Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn (without much knowledge of what I was looking at).  I remember one cold winter night looking out the front door at the moon and noticing a bright star about to be occulted by its dark, leading edge.  I rushed to set the scope up on the front stoop and caught my first occultation.  I would observe in the backyard when I could until I got spooked or tired.

And until the lights from the Akron Expressway interchange built just southwest of the house ruined the skies there forever.  Then the Palomar Jr. went ignored in disuse.
 

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