There were many reasons I wanted a bigger 'scope, but I remained loyal to my 4" refractor.
In the interim, I managed to amass rather a number of star atlases. The reason we amateur astronomers want bigger scopes is we want to see even more of the heavens above. It's called Aperture Fever and it is incurable.
I tried getting others in my family interested in stargazing, but they mostly just said NO. Even after seeing Saturn and her moon, Titan, they were able to walk away from astronomy. The exception was my granddaughter Molly, now twelve years old. She really gets into it when she comes to stay with me. Once, we were lying on the front porch, just looking up at night sky overhead, when a big fireball whizzed across the dark sky. We laughed and hugged each other in our excitement.
There is no quicker way to clear the room than to discuss astronomy. A couple of years ago, at Molly's house, the big kitchen table was filled with family and friends. She was showing a star atlas, pinpointing our recent discoveries. No sooner had we started talking than suddenly it was just Molly and me and her dad. He would have drifted away, too, but she was sitting on his lap. She and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Her mom, my daughter Isabelle, says we are Not Normal.
A word of caution about visual (not automated) stargazing: a person gets into it thinking they can just have a quick look at the stars occasionally. Then they start splitting double stars and searching for fuzzy spots called globular clusters. They find comets currently in the news. They move to a place with darker skies. They buy more eyepieces and filters for their baby. They lose sleep. Friends drift away.
I started in 2005 in a town with much light pollution from nearby gas stations and other sources. I rigged up a tarp enclosure on the clotheslines. I kept my nighttime vigil accompanied by feral cats, in the dead of winter.
After all these years, it's apparent that I'm never going to get over my fixation on the stars. It's okay, I'm retired now and can nap the next day. It's amazing how I can be sleepy at 10:30, step outside for a quick look and suddenly it's 2:00 a.m. and I'm enthralled. I hear myself saying, "Oh, Wow," a lot.
In order to not become addicted to astronomy, do not check for exciting displays of the Sun's antics on spaceweather.com. That can only lead to buying a solar filter for the telescope.
Whatever you do, don't read read Starlight Nights, by Leslie Peltier, especially more than once.
