Stephen Euin Cobb was born in Orangeburg South Carolina in 1955, but when he was only one year old his family moved to the western suburbs of Chicago. It was there that he spent his formative years.

Thanks to after-school reruns of Star Trek, NASA's widely televised lunar landings and a few dozen second-hand science fiction books-he developed a lifelong fascination with astronomy. He considers himself to have become an amateur astronomer at the age of thirteen; when, on a cold fall night in 1968 he propped his father's little thirty-power spotting telescope on the hood of the family Buick and found his first planet. It was the ringed planet: Saturn.

He has earned his keep in an unusually wide variety of professions. He's been a bank teller, construction worker, security guard, radiation worker in a nuclear facility, computer programmer and a long-haul truck driver.

Stephen's somewhat unusual middle name-Euin-is pronounced like a contraction of the two words You in, with the emphasis placed on You. This was his father's middle name, as well as that of his father's father. He believes it to be a Gaelic word which means young.

Biography provided by theu author, February 2003.