Like a lot of kids, my folks gave me a 60mm telescope for Christmas one year. The scope was a typical department-store brand - not very good - but to a 12-year old kid it opened up the universe.

Through it I got to see the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn. But above all these eye-openers, there was the moon. There in the eyepiece stood craggy mountains - spires casting long shadows across crater lowlands, dark maria and (painfully) bright highlands, a surface pockmarked with craters of all sizes, some with bright ejecta rays and some funny squiggle type features. I soon learned that the greatest amount of detail was seen along the terminator, that line splitting light from dark, where shadows played across features showing them in stark contrast. And to cap it all, each night different features could be seen in detail.

They say that as you get older, your memory plays tricks on you - you remember good things more than the bad. I remember lots of clear, frosty winter nights when I could point my 'scope at the moon and scan its disk for some feature I had not seen in relief before. These days, the skies seem to be cloudy much more frequently and the frosty winter nights are few and far between. I guess that's global warming for you!

Time moved on and I moved in and out of committee positions in astronomy societies, editing some magazines along the way (I now put my own ezine, called Photon, together every couple of months). Astronomy became more about the bureaucracy of running clubs than about looking through a telescope. Then, in the late 90s, wanting to get back to my astronomical "roots", I bought a 'real' telescope, an 8" reflector which I readily turned towards the moon. Stunning views once again assailed my eyes (prompting memories of halcyon nights as a 12 year old looking through my old 60mm scope).

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