Looking Up From Pale Blue Dot

I don't know where it all began. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, wanting to look at earth from space. Wanting to look at everything around here from the silence of space. Looking up at the sky was one of the thing I used as a kid, lying down in the dark, looking out of the window besides my bed, till the time night sky made me sleep. One of my earliest memory of looking up was watching Hale-Bopp comet in the direction of sunset during summer of 1995.  That image is still fresh in my mind. Whenever I think of it, I can clearly imagine myself sitting on that bench at Priyadarshini Park, by the sea, getting that same feeling that I had felt more then 25 years back. Learning that Galileo invented the telescope to help him look at planets sparked a lot of curiosity in me as well. I wanted a telescope too! But never got it as a kid. As I grew up, obviously I did not become an astronaut. I got busy with my life, floating around wherever it took me. Never bought a telescope.  B...