<font color="orange">Was hoping on gathering some insight on what astronomy means to the posters here</font><br /><br />living in the seattle area on the far side of Lake Washington and lying on a blanket in the grass watching the stars closing in on me. I wondered even then if someplace in that cold, dark space we call the universe, if there was another world with another little girl laying on a blanket looking at the stars wondering the same thing I was.<br /><br />I remember sitting outside in deck chairs watching the aurora boriallis (sp) and in total awe of the beauty of it and wondering how it could happen. Sitting in the same deck chairs during a eclipse of the moon and trying to stay awake watching the earth chasing the moon. How wonderous, how beautiful.<br /><br />However, when I was growing up, girls didn't study science or math, we studied English, secretarial skills, and the closest we came to science was biology in case we wanted to be nurses....So I stifled my questions and my yearnings until my children were born and then they came flowing out the mouths of my babe's....So I studied a little, just enough to answer their questions. However, women didn't study math or science, and by the time they did, I went back to school again, but math was not my best subject so I'm a history major, studying NA history.<br /><br />But a jigsaw puzzle caught my eye one night, it was of a nebula and it was spectacular, and the name in the corner of this puzzle was space.com....so I followed the link and wound up here, and my learning is almost insatiable...I cannot get enough....