Re: Coulter Telescopes

No. Coulter (Jim Braginton's California company) went out of business
years ago. The name was sold to another firm, Murnaghan of Florida.
They produced a few Odysseys for a while, but only for a while. My
guess is they figgered (rightly) they could not compete with the other
players in the low-end dob biz.

There was some talk of them reviving the Odysseys a while back, but I
don't think anything ever came of it.

Jim Braginton's (Jacobson's) scopes were not fancy, and there optics
were not <ahem> top-notch, but he did turn a lot of folks on to the
deep sky in teh 80's and early 90s.

A friend of mine who is a professional optician says that one of Coulter's
problems was that they used unanealed glass. The Coulter scopes I've looked
through were enjoyable at 50x but not at 200x. Coulter used to have demo
star parties at their plant in Idyllwild, CA, and I know he sold a lot of
scopes that way, and people seemed to be happy. This was at a time when
anything bigger than an 8-inch scope was a BIG scope and likely to be
extremely expensive, and people could be blown away by sheer light-gathering
power. I always swung by on a Sunday when no one was there, so I never had
a chance to go in the showroom or talk to anybody.
--
Curtis Croulet
Temecula, California
33°27'59"N, 117°05'53"W


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