Was so much fun I had joined the Livonia Astronomy Club back in the 1970′s.

I have my Celestron C4.5 from 1988, that I bought in Hawaii.

I didn’t agree with you first, but last paragraph makes sense for me

First look through a telescope was Jupiter. I think. It was a club star party so Saturn and M13 might be runners-up. Jupiter stands out because one very nice man stayed an extra hour so that he could show me one of the moons (I forget which) transit and cast a shadow on the face of the planet.

In Binoculars, it was the Pleiades, Betelguese, and the Orion Nebula. Same night.

What a piece of junk. Crap mount, crap eyepieces, crap finder. Because my parents didn’t know any better and because it was good for very little else. The white metal mount was always unsteady and broke within a year. My Dad offered to build me a new tripod but everything else was so bad, I sad it wasn’t worth it. We used his 8×40′s for years afterward.

The next one was Mercury’s transit across the Sun, except obviously I didn’t look through the telescope at that.

If you don’t count the Earth, it was the Moon. But my Sears refractor was also used to see Saturn and Jupiter, and a total eclipse. These days, my log shows M57 more ofthen than anything else.

This was the first telescope I had, a present one Christmas probably while Kennedy was still in office (the latest it could have been was 1963 because we moved in 1964):

http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-A-C-GILBERT-TELESCOPE-80X-WITH-CASE_W0QQitemZ250208275744QQihZ015QQcategoryZ31745QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem

Although it had only one eyepiece which gave 80× with in most cases a noticeable amount of chromatic abberation, I credit having to use such a small ‘scope with making me a better observer. I wasn’t able to get anything larger until I got a RV-6 Dynascope in 1970, by which time I’d pretty much decided to pursue astronomy rather than to major in chemistry when I got to college.

(I still have that old Gilbert telescope somewhere, although when I dug it out some years ago I discovered that years of exposure to the air had destroyed much of the aluminum coating on the mirror.)

I was in year 6 at primary school,1986, Gold Coast Australia, and we had a special function for anyone interested at my school one night during the week around 7 pm. I went there mainly to chase a girl I liked ( I knew she was going hehe) but soon got interested in the telescopes that were set up.

Before we saw the comet, they showed us something else. I could see this huge dark lumpy object. I wasn’t aware it was the new moon at the time, as I wasn’t really paying attention to what the astronomers were talking about. I imagined it might be Mars or something, but in hindsight it filled the entire eyepiece and I could still make out craters and things and now know it was the new moon. My kiddie brain and lack of interest in astronomy didn’t register at the time that it was a ‘dark’ moon. A short time later I got to see Halley’s Comet.

That night something clicked and it was all over for me. I had the Astronomy bug. I got my first set of binoculars a year later, and my first job at 16, I saved up 1000 dollars and bought a 4.5 inch dobsonian on an equatorial mount. All my friends thought I was a complete nerd spending that much money on the first big thing I would ever buy, but they just didn’t get it. They still don’t. I now use a homemade 10″ truss dobsonian that works beautifully. On one occasion, as I was near completion I got a visit from an old friend, who upon seeing it, said “who builds a telescope? .. oh .. you do. *laugh*”

Sometimes I am glad they still don’t get it. ;p