On 03/13/2016 09:55 AM, wrote:
They provide a cheap and accessible way for a newbie to gauge his or her interest in amateur astronomy!

(This is not a troll.)


I can't say my first experience had such a positive outcome. When I was
about 8 years old, I received a "focal" refractor for Christmas. I don't
remember what size it was, but it was attached to a mini tripod. My
father and I rode out into the country to try and look at Saturn with
it. Not only could we never find Saturn, but nothing else either. My
thinking, in retrospect, was that the reason was probably because it was
advertised as like a "300x telescope" and the FOV not only horribly
small, but the cheap plastic would have never allowed us to see
anything. Needless to say, because my dad had kept the receipt, he
packed up the scope and returned it. I never touched optics again until
like age 12.

This time, "Focal" brand again, but a pair of 20x60 binoculars that I
spotted in K-mart. Got them for Christmas that year and the difference
was like night and day (in fact, I still have them and occasionally use
them). Achromat lenses, but I got a lot of joy out of them until I was a
freshman in high school and ordered my first serious instrument with my
Summer job money, a Coulter Odyssey 10.1" Dob. It took 7 months to
arrive, so came the following Spring and just before Summer break from
school. I got tremendous joy out of using that scope all throughout high
school, star hopping from DSO to DSO and taking on ever more challenging
DSO observing. Luckily, my skies were the equivalent of a yellow zone
then, so I was able to observe quite a lot. In the years that followed,
it has become increasingly yellow-red and now red.

I sold the Dob sometime in the 90's and never got back into astronomy
until 2003 for the Mars opposition. I was more or less involved until
2010 or so when I started having difficulty reselling my equipment for a
price similar to what I paid. Up until that point, I had no problems
reselling for 85% or better of what I paid. Showed me that the economy
hasn't been all that good for the last few years, so I have abandoned
acquiring any further equipment for now until/ if economics improve once
again.

So, department store didn't work for me for scopes, but it did binoculars.