I loved both the lectures and the labs for the three physics courses I took in the 1970s - all in astrophysics - and am so very grateful to have had the good fortune to learn from excellent teachers.

The first object I learned to identify with the naked eye was Deneb, a bright star which in Denver in mid-September early evening was at zenith - straight above.

There was a small observatory near the college. Although we were in the middle of the city, we still got a good enough view of the night sky for students to see various wonders of the universe and to witness their apparent motion across the sky. The telescope was attached to a clock drive so that its aim traveled at the same rate as the rotation of the earth. This way, the teaching assistant could aim the scope at the Beehive cluster, or a planet, and not have to reset it as each student filed through to take a look. Even though the object had moved slightly in the sky, the telescope moved with it.

The teaching assistant scheduled an extra lab one night for those who wanted to take photos through the telescope. He showed us how to attach a single lens reflex camera to the scope, and take a timed exposure. There was some guesswork to how long to leave your shutter open, so you took several shots, and hoped that one would work out. Using black and white film in my secondhand Miranda, I photographed a globular cluster. A week later, after getting the film developed, I was holding a piece of paper with information - a pattern of light - that had physically traveled from thousands of light years away to the film in my camera. Even though the stars came out a bit blurred, it was mind-blowing to have a photograph of something so distant and beautiful. The photo wasn't nearly as good as the pictures in the textbooks, but it was so real, the burst of white stars on the glossy black background. The distant globular galaxy sending out a moment of light that originated millenia before I was born was connected to a cold dry night in Observatory Park on Earth in the 1970s was connected to me at any moment I looked at the photo, wherever I was standing - a kind of multidimensional triangulation of space and time and mind.

The only activity that bugged me in the three courses occurred in an early lab where we each measured with a regular ruler the images of spectra from several different stars. Each spectrum - that rainbow of fractured light through a crystal or prism - was printed in strips divided by naturally occurring vertical lines. The distance between the lines was related to different elements. The activity of measuring the distances between the lines was matter-of-fact, but it still stands out that something simple that could have been pleasurable felt uncomfortable.