College Admissions Essay: My Interest In Astronomy
Astronomy was the first science that interested me. As a child I subscribed to Young People's Records. Every month I received in the mail a 10-inch 78 RPM record, or sometimes a package of two records. One day I received a record called "By rocket to the moon". It contained a fictional story about a trip by space ship around the moon and back to Earth, some 19 years before that actually happened, as well as some facts about the planets, which in those days included Pluto. That sparked my interest in astronomy. I devoured every children's book about astronomy in the public library. I soon found that to deepen my knowledge of astronomy I had to learn more physics; so I started reading physics books and soon got interested in that subject
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It's small enough to fit into one's pocket, but it performs as well as Muggle telescopes many times its size and many times its price. There's a knob for zooming and one for manual focussing. Some Muggle telescopes have these controls too, but this magical telescope refocusses automatically. There's a button for measuring the observed size of a celestial body as seen with the naked eye and another button for measuring the albedo of various parts of a celestial body. The lenses have scratch resistant and break resistant charms on them. Now these features could be easily imitated by Muggle telescopes, but they're not the most impressive things about this model. A Muggle telescope of that size can't go beyond about 50 power without the image getting blurred and shaky too because of the movements of the both the body and the atmosphere. A larger Muggle telescope gets better resolution and a tripod can be used to eliminate shaking of the body, but they're much more expensive, and Muggle ways of further improving the resolution (interferometry) and overcoming the movement of the air (adaptive optics) make these telescopes beyond the financial means of all but the richest amateur astronomers. The student model of the von Rheticus magical telescope uses magic to overcome all these problems at a price that is affordable even to first-year
It's small enough to fit into one's pocket, but it performs as well as Muggle telescopes many times its size and many times its price. There's a knob for zooming and one for manual focussing. Some Muggle telescopes have these controls too, but this magical telescope refocusses automatically. There's a button for measuring the observed size of a celestial body as seen with the naked eye and another button for measuring the albedo of various parts of a celestial body. The lenses have scratch resistant and break resistant charms on them. Now these features could be easily imitated by Muggle telescopes, but they're not the most impressive things about this model. A Muggle telescope of that size can't go beyond about 50 power without the image getting blurred and shaky too because of the movements of the both the body and the atmosphere. A larger Muggle telescope gets better resolution and a tripod can be used to eliminate shaking of the body, but they're much more expensive, and Muggle ways of further improving the resolution (interferometry) and overcoming the movement of the air (adaptive optics) make these telescopes beyond the financial means of all but the richest amateur astronomers. The student model of the von Rheticus magical telescope uses magic to overcome all these problems at a price that is affordable even to first-year