I think I’ve mentioned more than once (hah!) that I think in frameworks. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote my HR guide. I have a framework that works for me, it makes sense to me. More importantly, it lets me make sense of the HR world AND to be able to communicate that approach to others in a way that often resonates with them and let’s them understand it.

I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I don’t have the deepest insights. I’m not the most experienced with the most profound understanding of a topic. But I often can find a way within a framework approach to figure out how **I** understand it, and then explain that same approach to others in a way that they tell me they find helpful.

It works well for HR, but I am confident enough to admit that I know it is an approach that works in other areas too. I might have trouble EXPLAINING the framework until I’ve actually created it or written it down, but once I have it down in some form of written or graphic form, it’s clear. And then I own it intellectually, spiritually, physically, mentally. It becomes part of me.

Enter the astronomical need

Okay, so bad pun, but I’m into amateur astronomy. And I love all the great resource guides out there from people like Burnham, Dickerson, Dyer, etc. They are great guides. Intro tools, advanced tools, larger guides to specific phenomena. All of it. Great.

And yet…

The guides also frustrate the f*** out of me.

First and foremost, almost none of them bother to explain what astronomy is, they leave it basically as “space stuff”. Maybe a little more detailed, but they assume we all know astronomy is about looking up and out.

And so none of my texts that I have (and I have too many, plus I’ve borrowed a lot) bothers to actually define the different areas of astronomy or explain their various subfields. From an academic perspective, there are generally four main “swaths” and those break down into 17 more sub-categories. The first of which is astrophysics, both as a main swath and as the first subcategory. And while I don’t want to throw academic astronomers under the bus, that’s just lazy. You can’t have the top category and the sub-category be the same classification term, that’s bonkers. But the great intro texts that I see treat many of those other 16 subcategories like they don’t even exist. Pure academic texts DO cover the categories, so if you take a full-on astrophysics course, you’ll see the other areas, but for anyone else? Yawn. Nothing to see here, move along.

Yet how can you talk about astronomy to people if you don’t even tell them what the term “astronomy” includes? And while I’m venting, can I mention that all the stuff that amateur astronomers do, that hobbyists and home-based scientists do to contribute to the base of knowledge, doesn’t actually “fit” within any of the 17 categories? I asked on a few enlightened fora for some feedback as to where people would tend to classify our visual astronomy or astrophotography, and they quite happily told me that our activities don’t fit any of the categories because either (a) our stuff was too amateur to be considered OR (b) our stuff wasn’t science so didn’t fit OR (c) I swear to god, they told us that what we did wasn’t big enough to count as astronomy. Ummm…so all the experts who wrote those guides to astronomy, including for laypeople and amateurs, got the term wrong? We’re doing dust viewing or something other than astronomy? I can’t quite follow the logic on that one.

Second, very few of the guides even bother to talk about different equipment options. They’ll cover lovely info about types of objects and things you should look for, but they won’t actually tell you about the equipment itself. Like somehow the mechanics of it all, which was good enough for Galileo, is somehow too pedestrian. I’ve read three recent guides that were aimed at solving that “gap”, and each one of them left me cringing. One was incredibly technical. The book is several hundred pages, and looks like they took some technical paper they wrote about something semi-related, lifted a previously-written background section about optics and colours, and threw it in with detailed measurements that might matter to a lens designer, but not to the target audience of the guide. The result was so badly off-target that I showed it to five fairly knowledgeable people in the astronomy space, and only 1 even understood it while the other 4 thought it was of no use to anyone. None of the guides had any sort of “frame” to help people understand the various parts of a telescope and why it is relevant to how it is used / chosen and when or why.

Third, two of the guides were really really solid in a different aspect in that they curated a number of telescopes on the market and said phrases like, “In this price range, maybe this or this would be good”. Which is great from the perspective of distilling information down to a presumably useful point of view.

Yesterday, I got one of these guides that I had just found out was coming out, and I thought, “YES!”. I like the guy who wrote it, I have seen his stuff before, and I thought, “Awesome, he’ll explain it in a good way and I’ll be able to just point people to his document.” Umm, well…crickets. The report / guide is out, but it suffers from a very common and fatal flaw, in my opinion.

Failure to ask some basic questions of the readers

For context only, and without getting into great detail, a telescope generally consists of a base (like a tripod); mount (how the telescope attaches to the tripod); the optical tube assembly (aka the telescope itself); a focuser; replaceable eyepieces; and a finder tool. For most amateur setups, there are 2-3 types of bases, 2-3 types of mounts, 4-6 types of OTAs, 2-3 types of focusers, 2-3 types of eyepieces, and perhaps 3-4 types of finder tools. That could, in theory, give you some 1944 combinations, but really almost all of the combos collapse down to about 10 common setups. Not including accessory choices.

What drives me batty, I confess, is someone online (often) asking, “Which scope should I get?” and people respond, “Get this” or “get that” (or DON’T DO THIS EVER with suggestions that if you do, bad curses will befall you). And yet, none of them ask even the most basic questions of the future buyer.

Like, “Hey, what type of astronomy do you want to do?” (Ooops, there’s that definitional problem again). Are they going to do visual only or visual and some astrophotography or heavy into astrophotography? Those are almost 3 different hobbies, to be honest.

Or perhaps, “Are you going to be looking from your home location or moving the telescope around a lot?”.

Or perhaps, “Do you have any mobility issues?” (often relevant for weight of gear).

Or perhaps, “Is it just you using it most of the time or are you taking young children too? Are you planning on doing viewing for large groups?”

Now, don’t get me wrong, the advice in the two guides that I reference are not terrible. They aren’t recommending bad scopes. But they give almost NO information to the would-be purchaser why one setup would be better for their needs than another.

As an example, one of the most common pieces of advice is, “Buy a Dobsonian.” There are about 5 assumptions that go with that advice, and perhaps 50% of all new astronomers could fit within those assumptions to some extent. Particularly as they don’t know yet until they try it. And yet I’ve seen people who know that advice, and they still range from “buy this mini dob at $150” all the way to “skip the Dob, buy this rig for $4500”. WTF????? Where in the H, E, double hockey sticks did you come up with that last recommendation???? Oh right, you’re into astrophotography, and think everyone else is exactly like you. Got it.

So why am I bitter?

Cuz I don’t really have a burning desire to write such a guide myself. Like I said, there are more knowledgeable people than me. I have past trauma in scope selection that burns a bit too bright at times, which drives me to want to help others. But I don’t want to redraft it all every single time I see someone ask the question online. Yet I hate the answers they get which likely as not just confused the person. I want someone else to give me the framework I want so that I don’t have to create it myself.

I got the new guide, ANNNNND it’s not there. There’s no framework. The recs are solid, I’ll reference them for other purposes. But I feel like I’m still on the hook to write my own guide. Even if only so others can look at it and say, “Meh, too complicated.” But if one person reads it and says, “OHHHH, I get it now. I understand the framework you created, I can ask better questions now to help me tailor my choices”, then it’s worth the work.

I would just prefer someone else did their work differently so I don’t have to do my version. I was reading an old post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch where she was talking about the difference between her writing NF vs. fiction books. Her fiction is for her; her non-fiction is for other people. And that’s my non-fiction premise too…it’s to help other people do something in a structured way that improves the chance of them getting a good outcome that works well for them.

So I still have to write my own version. Dang it.