Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

astronomy 51 MARCH-APRIL 2020 OUR EXPERIENCES amateur astronomers was given the opportunity to grow rapidly, thanks to the birth of the first astronomy magazines aimed at a wider audience than the strictly professional one. As examples of those magazines, we can cite the French l’Astronomie , founded in 1882 by Camille Flammarion (still published, edited by the Société As- tronomique de France), or the Italian magazine l’Astrofilo , founded in 1900 by Isidoro Baroni (and published until to 1908), or even the American The Telescope (1931-1941) and The Sky (1935-1941). Thanks to these and other publications in different coun- tries and different languages, the movement of amateur astronomers not only managed to organize and structure itself, but soon became an increasingly attractive commercial target for manufacturers and retail- ers of instruments dedicated to ob- serving the sky.