Nick Previsich saw the night sky from four continents and a great many islands during his first career as a US Air Force avionics technician. His interest in space is deep and life-long, and his earliest memories include watching Gemini launches on an old black-and white television. He first heard of Carl Sagan in connection with possible models of the atmosphere of Titan in the early 1970s, and later was inspired by Dr. Sagan's frequent appearances on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. Although he's disappointed that he's not a lunar colonist, Previsich has settled in southern California with his wife Kazuko and a second career in the aerospace industry, and looks forward to having enough time someday to really give his Celestron NexStar 8 the workout it deserves.

As a child in Montana, I knew something of vastness. My hometown was an enclave nestled against the Rocky Mountains whose business was to wrest raw copper ore out of a wild Earth to build distant things in cities beyond my horizon and beyond my comprehension. I knew that they existed, but beyond the streetlights of Butte, Montana there was nothing but darkness and distance in the 1960s and 1970s, nothing at all but isolated headlights creeping on paved, civilized concrete paths through the darkness, surrounded on four sides by unknown shadowed vagueness…
…and above by the stars.

The stars. My God, how I remember the first time I saw the stars.

The people of Butte were largely miners. My paternal grandfather died in the mines long before I was born, and my teacher for the fifth and sixth grades walked with two canes after a crippling accident in the mines, sent to college as compensation by the Company for his disability. The focus was underground: there was always a fascination with the wonders that the raw Earth produced that transcended the dangers, and those who went deep brought this to those left behind on the surface. My teacher often spoke of the time that he blasted into a “bug-hole”, a void in the solid rock that, in this instance, held crystals of iridescent pyrite as large as his fist. My stepfather would occasionally bring me things that would bounce off the hood of his mine dump truck: chunks of raw copper, quartz prisms that would focus the Sun to a burning intensity, bright blue nuggets of copper sulfate, and, once, intricate wires of gold entwined around and through gray, crumbling matrix.

The subterranean world therefore had its appeal, to be sure, and my interest in geology was and is intense; the mine tailings in my backyard were a source of endless wonders. But I’d already learned from books that there was so much, much more, but could not yet see it.

I never knew that I could not see until I began school. So much of my world was right in front of me that I thought it normal that clear vision began approximately 15 cm in front of one’s nose. Books were clearly visible at this distance, after all, and with only one television channel that was available sporadically how often was there any reason to see further? I knew the Moon as a bright white blot, and assumed that the stars and planets required a telescope to see at all.
However, it became apparent that my vision was quite limited when I could not read the chalkboard, even from the first row of desks. This was quickly diagnosed and remedied, and throughout that school year I marveled at the fact that I could now see the birds I’d only heard before, the outlines of clouds. The face of the Moon was apparent for the first time, and the Apollo landings were in progress then; I memorized the face of that world and carefully followed the astronaut’s activities, transforming that blank, blotched disk from an evening apparition into a real place.

But winter in western Montana frequently began in late September, and 1969 experienced an exceptionally severe season. For me, the stars would have to wait for the Earth to become hospitable again.

When July 1970 finally came, my family resumed its custom of spending weekends at our cabin near Wise River, MT about an hour out of town…$10 a month rent, erratic power, no plumbing, but a wonderland nonetheless nestled in the Big Hole River valley. Boundaries and interfaces were everywhere: between land and river, mountains and sky, between the tiny patch of human activity that was the cabin and raw, untamed wilderness where you had to keep a close watch at all times for bears, wolves, the occasional mountain lion, and the nearly-legendary wolverines.

Nights there for me until then had been uniform and featureless: impenetrable blackness, so dark that it was a tangible thing. But I had spent the winter studying star charts, so on that first night I stepped outside prepared for much more.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Slowly, though, the sky above began to appear granular. After a few more minutes I saw brighter lights and many, many lesser ones…and they kept coming. The longer I looked, the more became apparent. Gradually, I realized that the stripe of cloud running north to south was in fact the Milky Way…and I was jarred by a sense of three-dimensionality about what I was seeing.

There it was: the Galaxy.

I was staring sideways down an enormous disk of stars. The nearest & brightest were all around me, faintly colored. Looking at these, I recognized Vega, and then the Summer Triangle…the books were true!!! Looking south, I saw the Galaxy thicken up dramatically near the horizon—that was the core, in Sagittarius!—and found the red beacon of Antares.

How unbelievably, unimaginably large this is. How small we are. I had never seen an ocean buoy, but would have instantly understood the analogy. What’s out there? My God, it’s so huge…what’s not out there???

I don’t know how long I stood Out There until my mother called me in. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it all. I saw stars disappearing quietly over the mountains to the west, and new ones emerging in the east, and felt the Earth turn under me as we slowly spun through this mysterious, beautiful vastness.

I could see now.

As the years passed, my astronomical observational abilities increased, and often I would try to pass my enthusiasm on to friends and family, sometimes with evangelical furor. Most of the time this was met by polite nods or, in the case of my friends, not-so-polite mockery, but this is the nature of the young.

This was occasionally frustrating, and sometimes I felt quite alone. I could not understand why this marvelous reality was not the chief preoccupation of everyone. Who cares about Monday Night Football? Venus & Mars –Venus and Mars!!!—are in close conjunction tonight, 0.8 deg apart, rising at 4:40AM!!!...Huh? You don’t want me to wake you up???

If they couldn’t understand me, I certainly couldn’t understand them, and so I resigned myself to a lifetime of keeping this incredible thing largely to myself.

Happily, this was wrong. As usual, many important things happen at night.

One evening in the early 70s I was watching the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he had this guy on named Carl Sagan. He looked kind of like a hippie, which was cool, because at the time so did I. Johnny appeared to defer to him a bit during the introduction, and called him Dr. Sagan—hmm, interesting, he’s a scientist of some sort? Then the good doctor began to speak.

My jaw hit the floor. He was a “planetary scientist”; I’d never known that such a field of study existed. He said everything I was feeling and thinking, but could not say aloud for fear of ridicule—everything. He spoke of the chances for life on Mars, the forthcoming Viking missions, the vastness of space—“billions of stars”—the marvels of what he called the “cosmic ocean” with barely contained joy in his clear voice.

The audience never made a sound throughout the interview, which while not long (ten minutes?) was longer than most of Johnny’s guests ever got. When he was through, the audience broke into thunderous applause, far more than I’d ever heard from a Tonight Show audience, and Sagan smiled and waved at them.

He had said that we were not alone.

From that night on, I knew that I was not.