I have always had a fascination with the night sky and remember looking at the stars way back in 1978 as a youngster of 10 years. I owned no optical equipment, it was the unaided eye or nothing but I was still fascinated wondering what the strange fuzzy blobs that I could see dotted here and there but I knew what the Milky Way was but that was about it.

In those days light pollution was not so much of a problem as it is now, the nights were dark and transparent so I could see a surprising number of objects with the naked eye.

A little later I was given my first optical instrument, a pair of 10x50 binoculars and to my inexperienced eyes the universe suddenly opened up: those fuzzy blobs I had previously seen only with the unaided eye were now transformed - some appearing as featureless ghostly nebulosity, others revealed as clusters of stars and the Milky Way exploded into a myriad of stellar points, I knew how Galileo must have felt!

By the time I acquired my first telescope a small 60mm refractor of dubious quality mounted on a rickety wooden tripod which seemed to shake before you got anywhere near the eyepiece I was totally hooked. Even with this small instrument with it's limited light grasp and magnification it could resolve most of the brighter clusters into their component stars, show detail in the brighter nebulae and reveal many hundreds of galaxies albeit only as fuzzy areas and hundreds of beautiful double stars opened up to my gaze for the first time.

As the years passed I became more proficient at using astronomical equipment and thus progressed to larger telescopes: a 220cm F/6 Newtonian reflector then a 30cm Newtonian which showed fainter objects. I now use a 15cm refractor which suits my typical observing conditions and light pollution better than a larger telescope.