Okay grumpy old man you earned yourself some devil's advocacy.

The median age of an amateur astronomer given by people in marketing is 54. Visual astronomers, like me, are a decade older.

That means the median visual astronomer was 30 years old when the HST went up, and 37 when WFPC2 went online. That sounds about right - I was lugging a Coulter 10" Dobsonian around in the back of a Buick Skylark in those years where you could still pretend the ground was relevant. That shining period between billion dollar astigmatism and the Pillars of Creation shot.

'cuz I'm sorry - all the SBIG in the world will never fucking compete with that. Not ever. I tried a little game before I started writing this: I googled "most famous Hubble photographs" and "most famous Palomar photographs" and you know what? The Palomar shots are of Palomar.

Ever been to the Griffith Observatory? It's pretty funny reading their plaques trying to justify the place as if it ever did any real science. They pretty much boil down to "we stare at sunspots sometimes." 1.6 million visitors a year, beyotch. Shit, son, I paid $20 to sit in an Omnimax dome watching CG of the inside of Pillars of Creation at USC. And remember - I dragged a 10" dobsonian up to 11,000 ft on the reg.

I remember star parties out in the desert. We had good sky. The Pleiades are a loose cluster from the Sangre de Cristos, they aren't seven sisters. The Milky Way is a naked eye object from under a streetlamp. Rich fuckers, too, with like 12" Meades'n'shit. And what were things pointed at?

- Jupiter

- Saturn

- Venus (if it was crescent)

- M31

- ET Cluster

- Orion Nebula

...and maybe some rogue crankiwumpus like you insistent on making people look away from the center of the eyepiece so he could claim he showed them M81.

Now - I didn't drag 50lbs of sonotube above the frost line to stare at planets. I did my dark sky shit, and I enjoyed it. Doodled in notebooks by red light and everything. But I did that shit alone and I didn't expect anyone to come with me. The serious hunting? That shit is solitary. And you yourself, homie, spent half your time photographing and the other half processing. I've seen your shots. The social aspect pretty much demands a trophy. Sure maybe you can get some accolades for your dedication if you describe your adventures but the picture's worth a thousand words. And with the amount of post-processing that's been de rigeur in astronomy since Clyde Fucking Tombaugh, that means an equatorial mount or a steppermotored Dobsonian hack. And that means $$$$$.

Try and tell me Stellarvue was selling more than 200 scopes a year ever. I remember when the ex-Soviet Maksutov Cassagrains came out and holy shit you could do planetary astronomy for less than $4k. My family paid $400 a night to go to an astronomy B&B and they couldn't afford a 16" Dobsonian. $22k for a 10" MCT? Hot diggedy damn! You got anything aspirational for little shits like me who saved up half his summer's wages for a cardboard and particle board clunker with a telrad and a $150 Orion focuser?

Oh, yeah, you do. Those cheapass Celestrons you're pissing all over. That don't require you to drag out Sky Atlas 2000.0 and a wheel just to squint and talk yourself into thinking you're looking at the Crab Nebula. I was legit pissed when my cousin bought one of those because goddamn it, hitting the keypad and having the fucker find it for you was cheating.

You know what gets the young to give a shit? outreach. Plunking a $12k Celestron in the middle of a darkened baseball field so the normies can see Galilean moons. If you're going to go hide on a mountainside with $25k worth of optics then yeah - no one can join you if you've pulled the ladder up with you, homie.

Know what kills hobbies? Elitism. That's why vinyl still exists, and why skaters are still listening to Dinosaur Jr. 30 years later. That Icona Pop LP you bought at Whole Foods to play on the Salvation Army Technics you paid too much for because you didn't know any better? That's a gateway. So are those shitty Instagram-class Celestrons.

The last star party I helped run and organize ran afoul of the local college social media religious fanatics because we did not have "women friendly" facilities. At a primitive campground in a national park with no electric, running water or cell service.

I'll betcha if you threw another one on the University grounds they'd shut up. Yeah you're right - nobody serious could see anything serious seriously. But nobody following Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter is ready to venture an hour into the hinterlands to pretend they can see Neptune anyway. Couple times hanging out with their normie buddies? Sipping cocoa and schnapps while staring at things they could legit see through binoculars? That's another matter.

Go find a knitting group that has been around 10 or more years if you think this is only a dude-bro issue. Because damn, those poor people got fucked over, hard, by the newcomers with their "bitch and stitch" stores and runs on yarn, thread, canvas and equipment.

The social media shit has always been terrible. If you aren't fiercely aligned with a yarn store you're a tourist anyway. My wife is a voracious knitter and I'm here to tell ya - the real shit is offline. Who knows who, who's got the hookup. It's always been elitist, and I say that as someone who knew how to get the back stock out of knitting stores in Santa Fucking Monica. Meanwhile nerdgirls are lighting up Ravelry like it ain't no thang.

The kids are all right. They really are. They just don't like being talked down to, diminished, patronized and dismissed. I was just on a zoom meeting where I was the youngest person there by 30 years. I know that if I wanna get what I want out of the old schoolers, I have to bend the knee and ask the right questions? But fuck you man if you think astronomy is dying let's talk about clockmaking. Their outreach is limited to a table at the state fair.

Fuckin' Seth McFarlane got Cosmos remade. NASA now live streams their shit. And yeah - if people are expecting a backwoods star party to have a step'n'repeat they're going to be disappointed.

But there's something to be said for meeting people where they are, particularly if you're looking for new blood.