We just went out and saw a home observatory here in Canberra – a fascinating contraption on the front lawn of a friend of a friend. It’s taken him years to build and he’s still got further to go, but from hearing him talk, he is incredibly dedicated. I don’t think I could spend years building something that then takes even more years to get to a stage where you can actually use it. His main telescope, for example, had to be drift aligned so it could follow the particular stars he is photographing without losing them halfway through. That alignment is on a trial and error basis… and with my impatientness there is no way I’d be able to endure that. No, I want to use things before their five minute creation job is finished, not three years afterwards a three year job!
I don’t know why, but I never ask the questions I want to ask at the time I can ask them. We were there as a rather large group – with five of us inside the observatory at a time, and the others waiting out on the lawn. There was question time afterwards. I asked Barry what model camera he was using (turns out its a Canon EOS400D, basically the entry level Canon DSLR – so nothing special required!) but other than that… no further questions. No questions about how he got into it, how he learnt what he needed to learn, how he kept motivated to continue… the kind of questions which could result in answers that could well motivate me toward something….. whether it be working out what I want to do with photography or just something completely arbitrary.
I could have asked him a bunch of questions and then came back home and wrote up a piece on this man and his observatory. I could have done it in a journalistic way. But instead I just stood there listening to what he had to say and remained uninquisitive.
Perhaps I’m just tired. Maybe that’s all. I was maybe too tired to be really interested enough, but nonetheless, something about tonight I found fascinating… maybe it’s the fact that the creation we were talking about and looking at truly is… indescribable. We had been watching Louie Giglio’s Indescribable DVD at our guys group (it’s in two parts and I missed the second and didn’t pay much attention during the first) which is why we went out to see the observatory tonight. My attitude was something of the sorts of….yeah, it’s just about the sky. I know God made it, I know it’s pretty amazing, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily want to listen to a sermon on it. But tonight, I realised I might be missing something. Perhaps it was the enthusiasm of the other guys. Or perhaps it was, as Barry was speaking, when I realised that this is geography, astronomy, and photography all coming together – knowledge from all three fields all being applied – at once.
Let me explain. I have a bit of a wide variation of interests. I like IT, the media, politics, psychology, language, photography and geography to name a few. And I get excited when I can bring together what I know as a result of having these interests. I can report on the workings of a political party by photographing politicians and watching the way they interact with each other, then put that together on a webpage. That’s five of those listed interests working together. And as I was listening to Barry tonight, realising that if you want to photograph star trails you need to have geographic understanding to know whether you want to shoot to the north or south depending on the type of star trail you want and where you are in the world, I think I got excited that this is another link between the things I enjoy.
What does that mean? That I might enjoy astronomy? I don’t quite understand yet why I seem to be interested in such a wide range of activities. I used to be set on IT – no way is that my life anymore. I’m expanding, learning new things, almost trying to know a bit about everything. Sure it means I’ll never get bored, but what am I moving towards? Am I just keeping my options open? I think I’m heading towards something so unique and exciting that only I can do it with the exact set of skills and know-how I’m picking up now. The exact…but very varied set. I’m not going to be an expert at one thing, but rather I’m going to know a bit about a lot that will come together and let me achieve something that no-one else can achieve. That’s what I think I want to do. I just don’t know yet what it’s going to be.
Fascinating.
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