Re: Started with a 60mm Refractor?

From: Eddie Trimarchi (eddiet_at_bigpond.net.au)
Date: 11/07/04 

Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 06:06:58 GMT

> 60mm? What luxury! My first telescope (and I use the term loosely now)
> was a Tasco 30x30mm. I recieved this scope as a gift many years ago and

30mm? Luxury! I used to have a toilet roll with a magnifying glass stuck to
one end and then because nothing was in focus, I had to imagine what the
objects looked like! :) 

-- 
Regards,
Eddie Trimarchi
~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.astroshed.com
http://www.fitsplug.com
"Steve Maddison" <steve@cosam.org> wrote in message
news:cmivlf$5fj$1@reader10.wxs.nl...
> Jon Isaacs wrote:
> > I wonder how many of you who post and lurk here started with a 60mm
> > refractor or something similar?  I would like to see a show of hands,
> > lurkers can Email me privately...
>
> 60mm? What luxury! My first telescope (and I use the term loosely now)
> was a Tasco 30x30mm. I recieved this scope as a gift many years ago and
> don't remember doing much with it at all. The views pretty rough by
> anyone's standards, but it was OK for terrestrial viewing. I was very
> much into space and astronomy as a kid, but it never really occured to
> me to go out and actually try to *see* any of these distant things I'd
> been reading about.
>
> As if just over an inch of aperture wasn't small enough, it was stopped
> down, too. I can't find it now to check, but I believe the objective was
> at least some kind of glass, as opposed to plastic. There were no
> eyepieces as such - just a small lens mounted in the end of a chromed
> tube which you slid in and out to focus. IIRC, there was another lens at
> the other end of this sliding tube, which resulted in an upright image.
> The "mount" consisted of a foot-high tripod and some kind of plastic
> clip which held the OTA in place.
>
> But yes - this was the one that (re)sparked the interest for me, albeit
> several years later. It sat in a box somewhere in my old room at my
> parents' house, until they brought it over to my new place earlier this
> year. Getting a decent telescope had been in the back of my mind for a
> long time, but I'd never really had the space for one until recently.
> Anyway, I saw this little red scope sitting there and thought I'd try it
> out on the Moon. The mount is probably still at my folks' place, so I
> fashioned something resembling an alt-az mount out of shelf brackets,
> screws and Blu-tak! To be honest, I could see more detail on the Moon
> with my unaided eye than with the scope, but I decided right then that I
> *had* to get something bigger and better.
>
> Not to do things by half, I went ahead and got myself an 8" SCT, which
> is still opening up a whole new world for me. The last few months, I've
> been making up for lost time in a big way. My only regret is that I
> didn't do this a long, *long* time ago!
>
> -- 
> Steve Maddison
> Den Haag, The Netherlands
> http://www.cosam.org/

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