The planet Saturn photographed with an amateur telescope
Grey Zone / Alamy Stock Photo
When I was a teen, I joined an urban astronomy club at my school. It wasn’t popular: most nights, it was just me and a physics teacher standing on a Chicago street corner haranguing passersby to look through our telescope. In hindsight, it is a wonder my parents agreed to this, but it was one of the first things that really fed my love of space.
One night, another teacher joined us. He brought along an old-fashioned refractor telescope, the long kind. It looked much more…