The "2nd" moment was this blog which was an efflorescence of weird quantitative ret-fin desire that came out of nowhere (well, ok, not nowhere but getting a fake diet of "it'll be ok" from my high cost advisors and then finding out the risk was 8 times what they said it was kinda helped).
The "1st" moment was a telescope I built back in 2002. I had built one as a kid in 1970 and then I had built a couple others in-between but sometime in 2002 I had one of those Dreyfus moments. I decided I had to build a 10" reflecting Dobsonian reflector but -- and here is the kicker -- it had to be engineered as a truss design and all parts had to be fabricated from scratch. Where the hell did that come from? It took me me about 18 months of currying favor with my now-ex and my babysitters to make 50 runs a day to the hardware store and then a wee bit of "devil's tower" obsessiveness. At the end I had the picture below. Everything you see with a few exceptions is hand fabricated. Note that there is absolutely no logical reason whatsoever for the truss design for something that size. If it had been a 20-inch with a 10-12 foot trussed out structure, that makes sense. This had zero functional purpose. I just wanted to do it...I just wanted the look. I even tapped the threads in the aluminum pieces I hand cut. What did I do with it? Well of course I looked once or twice (it was pretty good, the image was better than another telescope I had, a 130mm refractor known to be among the best apochromatics on the planet) but after a couple looks it sat in my basement in MN and then made it to FL after a divorce I did not know was coming. Then sitting here in FL, I decided I should give it to a local school. They took it, of course, and promised to send me a thank you note...but didn't...ever. I should call and browbeat the science teacher that made the promise (one of the biggest things in my life as a caregiver for young children was stressing and stressing again and stressing one more time that "keep a promise" thing; I thought then and still think now that that is really really important. I am always disappointed when the concept is breached. That could explain some of my disappointments with living in the state of Florida). At least I kept a picture. Here it is:
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