Greetings Readers:

Having be in introduced to astronomy around age 5 by my Father, I can hardly remember a time in my life when observing the skies have not been part of my life.

Growing up in the 1960's, I had the thrill of seeing the early space flights and watching the space race progress to the lunar landings of 1969. I remember stepping outside to see the moon in the daylight sky with people standing on it for the first time. Little did I know that one day I would own not only a lunar rock but a Mars rock as well.

While I had a telescope at this time, my "large" 4.25" reflector would arrive in 1973, just in time for observations of comet Kohoutek. Observations of asteroids followed the next year.

During the mid-70's, I continued to track bright asteroids with Sky and Telescope charts, till learning of J.U.Gunter's "Tonight's Asteroids" newsletter. Shortly after, I began submitting positional measurements of asteroids to the ALPO Minor Planet Section. As the 70's passed into the 80's, I observed alone, not meeting another real astronomer till I had already notched about 40 asteroids.

After "Tonight's Asteroids" ended in the late 80's, I began my own "TA" like newsletter, free for a self addressed stamped envelope (remember those?) The "Near-Earth Asteroids Bulletin", went out to about 24 readers from 1988 to 1995. The experience gained would be priceless in the upcoming cyber-space world of the internet. Friends gained along the way gave me much the same pleasure that I am sure J.U. Gunter must have had with his much larger project.

Signing on 1995, I began "Asteroids Online" for America Online, running till late 1997. Success with "Asteroids Online", and other personal observing interest lead Prof. Frederick Pilcher , the Minor Planet section coordinator, to offer an assistant position in the section 1n 1997.

At that time, I founded the Magnitude Alert Project, a program which searched out asteroids thought to be in error in diameter, the H value, by observing large errors in predicted magnitude. Under Dr. Richard Binzel, the standards were established and the program began publishing suggested revised H values in the Minor Planet Bulletin. A few years into the program, Gerard Faure become involved with our database, and now manages this for the program. One of the world leading asteroid observers, Gerard's work is priceless to the program.

In 1999, I gave a talk to the first Minor Planet Amateur Professional workshop at Lowell observatory on the MAP program. I was invited to join Vishnu Vardhan Reddy's Spaceguard India as a founding member, and promote visual observation of asteroid as an introduction to the field. Brian Warner (minorplanetobserver.com) has been a long time friend and contributor in to our MAP Alerts with his studies of asteroid rotation periods.

While asteroids have been foremost in my astronomy, I very much enjoy the balance of the solar system, including solar, lunar observing. Extra-galactic Nova are easy picking after having seen 1200+ asteroids into the 15th magnitudes with my 12.5" f/6 reflector. In 2004, I added two asteroid discoveries to my name, under the Spacewatch FMO project, 2004 MO1 and 2004 SA, to go along with my 80 near-Earth object seen since first spotting 1862 Apollo in 1980. Other interests include cleaning and attributing ancient roman coins, and reading newsprint from the 1600's and 1700's, under these often clouded out skies of Vermont.

Lawrence Garrett