Re: Have refractors hurt the hobby?
From: Les Blalock (les_at_NOSPAMcableone.net)
Date: 11/05/04
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Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 09:52:43 -0600
On 05 Nov 2004 14:29:04 GMT, jonisaacs@aol.com (Jon Isaacs) wrote:
Snip...
>This scope is certainly far better than that $5 garage sale special that
>sparked me, the mount is sturdier, the finder better, the eyepieces far better.
>
>I am one who believes that it is not about the telescope, it is about the
>observer. If such as scope cannot excite you, make you wonder, pleasure in the
>view of a colorful double, gasp at the hint of nebulosity in Orion, wonder at
>the moons of Jupiter, if such a scope cannot do this, then one is probably not
>long for this hobby anyway.
More snippage...
Good post, Jon. I bought a 60mm EQ refractor (Orion) to use in a club
program and have had some real fun with it. I hardly see how the
topic could have been anything but a troll but the discussion itself
has merit - especially to help minimize the elitism perception of saa.
Thanks again.
Now, I'll hijack the thread on a tangent...
Our club does a public program titled How To Buy a Telescope in
November every year - hoping to prevent some post Christmas
disappointment. Attendance is very much dependent upon how much
publicity we get before the program.
Last year we also started doing a public workshop in February titled
How To Use A Telescope. The idea was that a lot those Christmas
scopes were beginning to get frustrating by February. In our How To
Use workshop, we tried to assign one club member to each workshop
attendee but there were so many department store scopes each club
member usually had 2-3 people to work with though they all had
basically the same equipment. I found the main things that doomed the
use of the cheapest scopes were:
Plastic, sloppy, .965 focusers
Plastic, crappy .965 eyepieces
Plastic, crappy finderscopes
Just about all the other problems we could help the owners minimize or
work around but those focusers were killers.
If anyone is interested in a few more details of how the workshop was
set up, I'll be glad to start a new thread but, for now, I suppose
I've frazzled this one enough.
Les Blalock
West Texas Astronomers
http://www.wtastro.org
- Next message: JBortle: "Re: "Unusual" asteriod (944) Hidalgo"
- Previous message: Stephen Paul: "Re: What's it worth?"
- In reply to: Jon Isaacs: "Re: Have refractors hurt the hobby?"
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