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/