If you were to choose the stupidest hobby you could come up with as somebody who lives at the west coast of Norway, astronomy would have to be pretty high on the list. It is almost always cloudy here, Kristiansund, where I live, is no exception. In addition, the nights from the end of April to the beginning of September are so bright that photographing galaxies and nebulae is not possible. But who cares about details? I also like landscape photography, so astronomy can be left alone during the bright season.
My brother-in-law says that the difference between a hobby and an interest is 100,000 per year. If it costs more than 100,000, then it is an interest 🙂 For my part, astronomy is a hobby, and a fairly cheap one. The hobby (and not an interest per definition) began when I was in primary school and my grandfather bought me a small telescope at Optikus Krohn on the pedestrian street in Bergen. I remember that the brand was Helios, and how exciting it was to see craters on the moon. The first time I saw the rings around Saturn was a great experience, as were the spots on the sun. I bought star atlases, books on astronomy and building telescopes, and read and dreamt about astronomy.
After childhood it became the “full package” with education, work, family and children. Time for hobbies was limited, other things took priority. One day the children had grown up and the nest was empty. And then came the coronavirus. All the social life disappeared, and there was plenty of time for hobbies, and extra beneficial were hobbies that could be pursued alone. Astronomy is a pretty geeky hobby, there aren’t many of us. If you see two hobby astronomers together, it must be possible to be characterized as a herd or mass formation, since the species is so rare. In autumn 2020, my interest in astronomy came to the surface again, and I decided to build a Dobson telescope, a so-called Dobsonian, named after the amateur astronomer John Dobson. But that’s another story.
A refractor quite similar to the first one I had. The picture is from Cloudy Nights