ZWO Seestar S50
TARS
The smart scope that started the mission: portable, fast to deploy, and responsible for first light on M42.
The origin story
A borrowed atlas. A gifted telescope. A universe waiting.
My journey began in 1982, when I was nine years old. I had just seen Blade Runner, a film that overwhelmed my young imagination and cemented my love of science fiction. Around that same time, my Uncle Dale and my Mom helped open a much larger universe to me—one that was waiting just outside our door.
Capturing photons emitted long before humanity took its first steps—all from the mountains of West Virginia.
- 011982 · The first map
Learning the night sky
My Uncle Dale let me borrow his sky atlas, and I would carry it outside to match the constellations on its pages with the stars above me. The night sky stopped being a distant mystery and became a place I could begin to explore.
- 021982 · First light
A telescope from Uncle Dale
While home on leave, he gave me a Jason Model 311 refractor with remarkably good Japanese optics. Through it, I explored the Moon's craters, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and its brightest moons, and Saturn—its rings suspended impossibly in the darkness.
- 031982 · Trust beneath the stars
The freedom to make it mine
My Mom trusted me—even as a child—to take the telescope outside, set it up, share its views with friends, and then carefully clean and pack everything away. That trust gave me the freedom and responsibility to make astronomy my own.
- 04More than four decades later
The calling never disappeared
Those nights left something inside me that never faded. I realized that viewing the cosmos—and somehow sharing that extraordinary scenery with others—was more than a passing interest. It was a calling, even if reaching its destination would take more than forty years.
