The planet Saturn photographed with an amateur telescope
Gray area / Alamy Stock Photo
When I was a teenager, I joined an urban astronomy club at my school. It wasn’t popular: Most evenings it was just me and a physics professor standing on a Chicago street corner, haranguing passersby to look through our telescope. Looking back, it’s surprising that my parents were okay with this, but it was one of the first things that really fueled my love of space.
One evening, another teacher joined us. He had brought an old-fashioned refracting telescope, the long type. It looked a lot more…
