Why Do You Observe?
A fair question, and one I didn't have a good answer for.
I decided to do a little soul searching to see what kind of response
I could come up with.

I believe my road to astronomical observation began with an interest
in reading. In May of 1992 I decided it was time to get an education
beyond my meager high school diploma. I started reading physics,
poetry and philosophy with a few sides of literature, religion and
popular science. Deep down I think I was looking for answers to the
age old questions "why are we here" and "what is our purpose"? To
date, I've read about 150 books from Einstein to Sir James Jeans,
from Ovid to William Carlos Williams, and from Confucius to William
James. I read Thoreau's Walden and almost finished Melville's
Moby-Dick. I've read the Bible and Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.
I eagerly devoured Tor Norretrander's The User Illusion and marched
through Carl Sagan's Billions and Billions. Of all these books, the
most memorable, monumental and truly mind blowing experience came
from Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters. In this book I
discovered a fresh look at Bell's Theorem and the concept of
superluminal quantum connectdness. If its true that all things are
connected, I thought it best to have a good look at the universe. I
read Zukav's book in August of 96 and I got my first scope in
October of 98. I had 27 months to think about Bell's Theorem before I
began to seriously peer into the heavens. After all this reading I
find I'm not any smarter and I haven't found the answers to those
questions, and I don't really expect to, but as the old Dutch proverb
says:
"He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey
behind him."

Clear Skies