John Haynes
I'm John, the guy who created this wiki.
I'm 46 years old (at the time of this writing), and live just outside of Houston, TX (on the Northwest side).
You can find me actively posting on r/telescopes and Quora. I also post occasionally on CloudyNights and Stack Exchange (Astronomy Beta).
How I got started in astronomy.
When I was about 5, my family moved to a small city in the high desert of California. My dad had always been interested in astronomy, even had a small refractor for a while. When we moved to Ridgecrest, where the skies were clear and dark, he would take me out in the back yard, lay out a blanket, and we'd lay back and look up. He taught me the constellations and some bright stars, along with the planets. We'd sometimes use his binoculars to see the moons of Jupiter or see the craters on the moon. Around my 6th or 7th birthday he bought me a build-your-own telescope kit. We spent a couple weeks working on it, arranging the plastic lenses and f-stops, then gluing the plastic housing together. It wasn't a great telescope, or even a good one, by any means, but it was really meant as a learning tool. When I was 8, Nova on PBS premiered Carl Sagan's original Cosmos miniseries over the course of 13 weeks. Normally well past my bedtime, I was allowed to stay up with my dad to watch it those Tuesday nights. I remember parts of a few of the episodes pretty clearly, thought I also remember falling asleep during most of them.
As time moved on, my interest in astronomy continued to grow. But it was never a career interest, just a personal interest. Shortly after graduating from High School I bought a film SLR camera. Not long after I did my first star-trail photos. I even attempted to build a motorized barn-door tracker, but never quite figured it out... sadly, this was before the Internet became widely available, and I was limited to a few books in my local public library for reference. But I still took unguided pictures, dreaming of the day I'd be able to afford a tracking mount.
Somewhere around this time, I remember looking to the south through my dad's old binoculars and finding a fuzzy blob near Antares. I wasn't sure what it was, until I looked it up in my dad's Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. It turns out that it was M4, a globular cluster. That launched my fascination with globlulars - an interest that continues to this day.
I also took an astronomy class at my local community college before transferring to finish my Psychology degree at a four-year institution. I needed a science elective credit, and jumped at it. After the final, the professor asked me if I actually learned anything from the class. He could tell I knew a lot about astronomy already. In fact, I DID learn several things, in particular the Hertzsprung-Russel Diagram. Still, he told me that he thought I probably could have taught the class, which I took as high praise from a professor.
While I remained interested in astronomy, over the next 15 or so years I didn't have much time, and never had much money, to put into it. I had a decent pair of binoculars, however, and would regularly use them to look at the night sky, looking for more globular clusters, and often looking at M31. Living in Vermont for most of the 2000's, we'd get a lot of frigid, but crystal-clear nights with spectacular, if cold, skies. I wish I'd had a telescope then...
In 2008, my father died of a massive heart attack. I had just been laid off from the company I was working for, and considering a move to Texas. My parents had been planning to move to the Houston area to be near my brother and their first grandkids. I decided it made sense for me to start looking at Houston as well, to be around family, and because it had a significantly better job market. When dad passed, we decided to get mom moved here as soon as possible, right down the street from my brother and his family. I got here a couple months earlier, and settled into life in hot, humid Houston.
About 1 year later, I bought my first telescope. It was a really lousy Meade 114mm Bird-Jones scope on an even lousier EQ1-style mount. Still, it was something. A couple weeks later, I joined the Houston Astronomical Society and started learning in earnest.
Astrophotography was a key interest of mine from the start. Part of my reason for joining HAS was to get access to the loaner telescopes and the observatory the club operates west of Houston.
<to be continued>
