"That first look at the Sun was unbelievable!" Coco remembers that one view that hooked him. Although his high school interests in other sciences like Geology also captured his imagination, Coco never forgot the rush of adrenalin that first view of a spot marching across the face of the Sun gave him. Ray Hedgpeth, his teacher, insisted on giving the class frequent looks at the Sun, as often as once each week.

As Coco's looks skyward increased during the seventies, he bought a small telescope and used it often in the clear sky of southern California. But he was mostly a lone wolf, keeping his interest to himself until he took out a subscription to Sky & Telescope. "I suddenly realized," he admits, "that there was more to it than just Mark Coco at the eyepiece."

After he finished high school, Coco attended El Camino College for two years and was awarded a liberal arts degree. He worked at a sporting goods store before realizing that his interest in astronomy was serious enough to merit working in the field somehow. In 1980, he entered that grey area that separates amateur astronomers from their professional counterparts when Celestron hired him to work in its customer relations department. He worked there for two years, then spent the next four to launch a computer business with his brother. He returned to Celestron in 1988 as manager of consumer relations, a position he held until the end of 1993. Spending time handling customer complaints and problems did not hinder his basic love of the night sky. "My philosophy was that in the end, the customer was always right," Coco says. "I tried to give as much personal attention to each customer who called. I wanted to keep them happy with the sky as well as with the telescope they bought from Celestron."

During his last two years in high school, Coco had a crush on a classmate named Colleen Carroll, but he couldn't bring himself to speak to her. With graduation coming he felt that it was either now or never. He wrote her a note, put the wad of paper in an empty Dr. Pepper bottle, and left the bottle on her front porch. Half an hour later, he walked by Colleen's house again and saw the bottle nicely set up on a tray. Colleen was interested! For the next week and a half he left flowers and cookies, till finally Colleen invited him over. They married four years later, and have four children, Kymberly, 12; Jennifer, 10; Lisa, 5; and Travis, 3.

Both Mark and Colleen recently pursued full undergraduate degrees part time, which is amazing considering that they had four children and both had jobs. Mark attended Cal State Long Beach, where he edited the University Magazine for a semester, and in 1991 he earned a degree in Journalism. The articles he wrote during this period included subjects like eyepiece projection photography, but the best article he wrote was about an utterly different sort of vision. Coco had investigated a little known part of the tragedy of the war in Cambodia, and wrote an insightful piece on hysterical blindness among women who had witnessed atrocities. "Their children," Coco noted, "were not allowed to love their parents or associate with them. Instead they were encouraged to torture them and kill them." Their blindness was real, though temporary.

On December 11, 1993, the Coco family was sitting in Rolling Hills Covenant Church, a nondenominational church packed that day with 1800 congregants. Mark was holding his daughter Lisa when suddenly he blacked out. The service stopped. An ambulance was called and Mark was moved to a pew in the back. When he came to after a half hour, he found himself in an ambulance under the eye of an emergency medical technician.

A week later the Cocos learned that he had a malignant brain tumor.

This last year has seen a cycle of radiation therapy, and on June 30 a surgeon was able to remove most of the tumor. To try to control the grape-sized mass that remains, Mark still undergoes a regimen of chemotherapy. The treatment has changed his appearance and has affected his ability to concentrate. He no longer is able to work at Celestron. But Mark continues an active writing schedule at home, tackling astronomical issues from the Green Flash, of which he has seen many, to philosophical subjects like the meaning of the Christmas Star.