And what better monument can any man be remembered for than the 4″ Edmund Astroscan? It was my first telescope, and it was not a toy, but a serious, portable and easy-to-use rich-field reflector of innovative design, priced so a kid could afford it if he saved his pennies.

No one had ever thought of doing that before. Mr Edmund may not have actually designed the Astroscan, but he caused to have it built and marketed because he knew there was a genuine need for such a thing: a simple, bare-bones but high quality telescope at a reasonable price. It was free enterprise at its finest, and I hope he made a fortune on it. What a wonderful gift to all the children of the world.

I remember the first time I used mine, on a bitterly cold night with perfect seeing. “First Light”, my initial look through it, was at M35, the great open cluster in Gemini, filling the field like diamond dust on black velvet.

I had only seen it previously through binoculars as a dim fuzzy spot against the night. But embedded within it, near its edge, I could now see another tiny cluster within the cluster, the faint glow of an even more remote city of stars just glimpsed through the closer and greater glory between us.

I looked it up in my atlas. It was real, not a vision; NGC 2158, far away in the cold and dark. I had never known that such a thing was possible.