I was at RTMC from Friday Morning.

I was also greatly disappointed at the great vendor vanishings on
Sunday. I decided to leave right after the Sunday evening raffle drawing.

I wanted to buy a few more items, but that was impossible after
everybody packed up.

If the program is the same next year as this one, I will do the same.
I used to stay through Monday morning.

On a positive note, it was nice of Meade Instruments to provide free
wireless internet access at their tent, and I have to give kudos to the
Bisque brothers, who spent over an hour of their time to help me with a
horizon file problem in TheSky Pro 6.

Also noted is that Software Bisque was the only major software vendor
who showed up this year. WHat happened to everybody else?

The food quality at the cafeteria showed a marked decrease in quality
this year. For some reaon they pre-dressed the salads at the salad bar,
which resulted in wilted lettuce. There was no lettuce or tomatoes for
the Sunday lunch hamburgers, and the Saturday morning pancakes were too
small.

Next year should be better with no Moon in the way. I'll still go,
but I may elect to lodge and eat in Big Bear.

Matthew Ota


Del Johnson wrote:

I attended the RTMC gathering near Big Bear, California over the weekend.

Highlights:

1. Tom Osypowski's (Equatorial Platforms) 24-inch Dobsonian on his aluminum
platform drive is once again the best telescope at the conference. I was
able to see the central star of the Ring Nebula, even under a gibbous moon.
One fantastic and surprisingly portable telescope.

2. I had a chance to view through Celestron's new 20-inch corrected
Dall-Kirlham cassegrain. It seems to work well as I was unable to visually
detect any coma at the edge of a wide field eyepiece. Could this surpass
the mighty Ritchey-Chretien? Stay tuned! A very good engineering effort by
Celestron, however, the $40k price tag puts it out of the reach of most
amateurs. Didn't quite see the central star of the Ring Nebula with this
one.

3. Good talk by Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy web page, except that the
audio/video techs almost ruined his PowerPoint presentation with a
malfunctioning (or just out of range) wireless keyboard. Instead, they kept
on blaming Microsoft for the malfunction.


Lowlights:

1. Sky & Telescope decided to treat all of their major advertises to an
offsite dinner and drinking party which meant that the vendors were not at
the conference Saturday evening (prime time) to demo their products.

2. The conference was a ghost town on Sunday. Anybody giving a talk on
Sunday was just wasting their time. The RTMC organizers could fix this by
simply moving the big Saturday door prize to Sunday, the I guess that that
there are too many "I want in now!" whiners to allow for that. The RTMC
conference is for all practical purposes a one-day Saturday event.

3. I was somewhat dissappointed with the version 6 upgrade to TheSky. Some
very nice improvements in visualizations, but only a few new astronomical
functions. Most of the menu functions are the same. There was a partial
fix with regard to the screen update problem in alt-az mode, but I wish that
they would implement full tracking in alt-az mode. I don't know too many
people who sit and watch the stars drift by in a fixed alt-az position, on
the other hand, more and more Dobsonians are now fully driven. I would also
like to see support for more of the natural satellites in the solar system.

Del Johnson