A friend gave me the premiered issue as a gift, and I started purchasing them with issue 6, the cover art being a shot from "destination Moon". (I eventually "back ordered issues 2 through 5.) I distinctly remember the first price hike because I arrived at "The Smoke Stand" (a newsstand/bookstore/tobacco shop) with the "exact change" only to discover it was no longer enough.
Probably the coolest issue to me was number 10 containing an article titled "Roll Your Own". Despite the seeming reference to Cigarettes, the article was really about creating your own opitcal effects using 8 millimeter home movie cameras. (This was 1978, '79, years before digital video or even affordable videotape recording.) To illustrate the various examples, StarLog used the "Leif Ericson Interplanetary Cruiser" kit, along with the Lindberg Lunar Lander and space station models, probably because they were out production and were not owned by a major studio to whom the magazine would have probably needed to pay usage fees.
That article inspired by childhood friend (who had given me the first issue) to start creating his own effects. Though he didn't land that dream job at LucasFilms as many of us probably fanatsized, he did eventually become chief editor at a Birmingham based television station where he won a couple of technical Emmy awards.
Sincerely,
Bill
