Started with a 60mm Refractor?

On 06 Nov 2004 15:04:18 GMT, (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...

Here's the story of my first scope.... ( a repost)

My first telescope:

There it was, a fine, fine refractor on a silky smooth mount with a selection
of finely crafted eyepieces. The whole thing was a bit dusty and there was
even a bit of dirt on the objective but that was simply due to a bit of neglect
by the current owner. I couldn't read the maker of this fine piece of
equipment, but that didn't matter, I was going to have a

TELESCOPE!

So, I reached into my pocket, extracted my wallet, my wad of cash just itching
to be spent, I looked at the owner square in the eye and said:

"Would you take Five for it."

The rapidity with which he said, "Yes" indicated he was done with this fine
optical jewel, but it was mine as soon as the $5 passed between our hands.

Home I went, excited and enthusiastic, anxious for first light.

With great care I hosed off the objective and cleaned the sand off the rest of
the scope. The eyepieces, well, they needed cleaning but at least they were
glass and brass and after a quick disassembly and some Windex they passed
light...

Now the mount, it was lacking a piece or two but nothing that could'nt be
fabricated with a hacksaw and a hammer.....


Fast forward to the Painted Rock Campground outside of Gila Bend, AZ, early one
fall morning.

The moon was no where to be found and I had found Venus, bright and sharp and I
could actually see that it was not a star. By this time, I had improved the
mount but the scope still would not stay still or stay in place...

And then, there it was, was it a comet? that flash of light as I wobbled past
it, unable to steady the scope adequately.

Just think, a comet near Venus....

Of course it took me about 15 minutes to convince myself that I was only seeing
an errant reflection of Venus in the poor optics of this once new 60mm nameless
department store refractor.

But by that time, I had happened upon something even more marvelous, I wasn't
sure what it was, it wasn't till sometime later that I was really sure. A tiny
bit of white haze surrounding some bright stars...

That morning, I had found for myself the Great Nebula in Orion and I was
hooked. That faint bit of nebulosity, that white haze, it was enough.

I was a goner.

Sometime later, that telescope was stolen by some fool from the second story
balcony of our duplex.

And sometime after that, after another 60 mm refractor at another garage sale,
came my first serious scope, a C-8 and sometime after than came another garage
sale special, a Cometron Jr. 125mm ST Newt that was to put me over the hump as
an enthusiastic starhopper.

And then came the first Dobsonian, a Pirate Instruments 8 incher with a lead
weight that doubled as the mirror cell and counter balance...

But that first cold morning in the dark skies of the Arizona desert I got that
glimpse of faint haze that has fueled my excitement ever since, sometimes I
think my quest is simply to repeat the exitement of that first moment with new,
fainter objects and bigger scopes and darker skies.

Yes,

Jon is getting a Telescope!!!

jon isaacs

Your experience parallels mine, 60mm for years, then to a C8. I
figure many people went that route when the Celestrons took off.
However, I never went Dob or widefield because I started using
setting circles (which if you are properly polar aligned
are serviceable on the SCTS)and rudimentary star hopping.
Once I realized that under light polluted skies magnification was
needed to see any deepsky object, I stuck with the SC.
I also like double stars and my first C8 had a good diffraction image.
I had the first C8 for 10 years and it was the main learning scope.
When I first saw the Orion nebula, I was shocked by how much better it
looked in the C8 compared to the 60mm. I even used the scope
(during one brutally cold and windy night) through a double-glazed
bedroom window just to see if it could track down M-79. I found
it! Not a great view though.
From then on, I've owned about every type of scope that can be
imagined, including every SCT except Meade's 16." I pretty much
know the pluses and minuses of each one, and I still come back
to the SCT as the best all round amateur scope. However, now that
Goto is finding it's way into every scope imaginable, that may change.
-Rich

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...

Tasco 6TE. 50mm f/12 refractor on the infamous alt-az table-top mount. I
still have the telescope. Looked at comet West (or was it Khoutek) when
I was about 6. Saturn, Jupiter (the GRS was actually RED), the moon. You
know what slowed me down ? School. I didn't buy another telescope for 20
years.

Eric.

"Martin R. Howell" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 10:30:18 -0700, Jan Owen wrote:

But once in a
while, I pull that 60mm out and down memory lane we go


The older I get, the more interesting that lane becomes and the saunters
down it more rewarding. It contains a beauty and serenity that youth
can
only wait to know.
Martin

Well said!
--
Jan Owen

To reach me directly, remove the Z, if one appears in my e-mail address...
Latitude: 33.662
Longitude: -112.3272

I started out by constructing small refractors using any available lenses and
cardboard tube I could get my hands on. No pair of eyeglesses was safe while I
was in primary school. Mostly they were awful performers. Then followed a love
affair with binoculars that continues to the present.
After college I purchased an inexpensive altaz refractor advertised in
S&T. The achromat lens was not fully polished out and the eyepiece lenses were
mounted in rubber but it worked. Using averted vision I was able to see M57
from a dark site. What a thrill. I still have it but have not used it for
decades.
Being an inveterate do it yourselfer, my next project was to scratch build
a 8" newtonian. I learned much grinding the pyrex mirror and building the
fiberglass tube. This is a great hobby!
Bill Bambrick
41 N, 73 W, 95 ASL

Pierre Vandevennne wrote in message 4...
(Jon Isaacs) wrote in
:

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 hand

I did, in 1969 - still have it. I painted Celestron Orange in 1979. Took
pictures of the moon and Jupiter's sattelites with it. Saw Saturn's ring
and ended up using it as a guider for wide field photography with a cheap
russian tele on a zenith body. It actually had/has a very decent equatorial
mount, and very little false color actually (at F/D 15 of course).

No matter how often I put a telescope on my
X-mas wish list, my father bought me a gun.

He said, "Telescopes are for sissy's"

Anyway, it's not always how much you
have, but how you use it
At least I learned to aim and sweep.

My first paycheck from my first part-time job
went to a 40 mm Tasco, with a pull out 25x...50x
times erecting eyepiece. The little short tripod
it came with was easily extended with tape and
wood dowels, (circa 1968).

I have 7x50 bino's but I'd recommend 7x35's
because the diff is not substantial and the 7x35's
are easier to keep steady, think mounting, i.e. you.

I bought a 60 mm Tasco, with a 90, holy poop,
that's a must have. A finder's ok but if you
learn how to aim it's redundant. The silly thing
came with a squirrely long spring thing to twist
the azimuth, that vibrated forever so that was
stripped off. Barlow...useless.

Normally at 30x - 60x it's ok, but because the
mount vibrates, I find in good seeing conditions
I'll jump x100 for Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, but
I've learned to place the view so it's ahead
of the target, so the target flies threw and
the image is very steady.

I thought of moving up to a motorized EQ mount,
but I'm worried about the motor vibration up-
setting the pure image. Certainly some vibration
would leak into the mounting and destablize the
image.
I figure even a little bit of vibration will
screw resolution. Comments welcome, is that a
valid concern?
TIA
Ken S. Tucker









































During the summer my neighbour mentionned that he had bought a small scope
and was utterly disappointed with it. It turned out to be one of today's
small cheap supermarket achromats. He brought it here for me to "fix". In
fact, the lens was acceptable but the main problem was the mount. There was
no way it could be reliably pointed at anything and no way the focus could
be manipulated without losing the random object it pointed to. I gave him
my mount and, with it, he could achieve at least some results.

Using that 60mm refractor on Jupiter or Saturn was like listenting to
"Paint it Black" or "Eleanor Rigby" on a small cassete player: definitely
awful by today's standard but intensely emotional anyway.

"Jon Isaacs" wrote in message
...
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...

I was about nine when we went to Memphis TN to visit relatives. My birthday
fell in the middle of the trip and we were at my grandmother's house.
Somebody carried in a box and said it was her new ironing board.

It was a 60 mm refractor. Well, that was the outer diameter of the lens. But
the outer 3-5 mm were clouded by the cement. The tube was cardboard and the
ends were plastic. The one eyepiece had a rubber tube, and you changed
magnification by sliding the barlow (lens mounted in a rubber ring) up and
down the focusing tube. There was no finder. The alt-az mount was sheet
metal and couldn't hold it any steadier than my hands could. Months later,
the glue holding the focuser in would fail (while it was set up in the
living room) and the focuser fell to the floor, breaking several of the
plastic teeth, and making a large gap where I could no longer focus (avoided
by pulling out the cardboard drawtube.

I'd give anything to have that scope back!

The second telescope came about two years later, from the local museum. I
had been there and spotted an 8" scope made by a local ATM. I was very
excited and announced that was what I wanted for Christmas. My parents
decided to spend a little more to buy a "store-bought telescope" --- a 4.5"
Tasco reflector. The next Christmas, my present was a windup clock drive.
Only when Christmas came, I discovered my mother had hidden the present so
well, she couldn't remember where it was! It was almost Summer before she
pulled out her sewing basket and accidentally discovered the clock drive in
the basket.

I'd give anything to have that scope back as well!

Clear Skies

Chuck Taylor
Do you observe the moon?
Try http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lunar-observing/
And the Lunar Picture of the Day http://www.lpod.org/
************************************

John Steinberg wrote in message:
raising hand
funny and interesting stuff (as always)
Damn, I can't recall how to close the raising hand tag!

John,

If I'm not mistaken, you'd use the lowering hand tag...but I might be way
off base here.

Dave
PS I'm enjoying the HECK out of the PST I scored a while back!!!!!
Binoviewers would be nice in it and I'm working on it.

My first scope was a Tasco 60mm refractor. I was 9 and it was 1971. White
and black tube on a round metal tripod that just could not be tightened in
any way. But I got used-to it's loosness and learned how to treat it the way
it needed to be treated.

Initial highlights were Jupiter, Saturn, Crescent Venus and Alpha-Centaurus
as a double. My first major star-hop was the Ring Nebula and it took me two
frustrating nights to find it, but once I did, it was a great feeling.

For nostalgic reasons, I tried it again a while back (30-odd years after the
first attempt with the C11 motors turned off, I star-hopped to M57 and
found it within 30 seconds. I think the aperture might have helped a bit,
but the skies were nothing like the pristine skies of rural NSW 30-years
ago!


--

Regards,

Eddie Trimarchi
~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.astroshed.com
http://www.fitsplug.com

"Jon Isaacs" wrote in message
...
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...

Here's the story of my first scope.... ( a repost)

My first telescope:

There it was, a fine, fine refractor on a silky smooth mount with a
selection
of finely crafted eyepieces. The whole thing was a bit dusty and there
was
even a bit of dirt on the objective but that was simply due to a bit of
neglect
by the current owner. I couldn't read the maker of this fine piece of
equipment, but that didn't matter, I was going to have a

TELESCOPE!

So, I reached into my pocket, extracted my wallet, my wad of cash just
itching
to be spent, I looked at the owner square in the eye and said:

"Would you take Five for it."

The rapidity with which he said, "Yes" indicated he was done with this
fine
optical jewel, but it was mine as soon as the $5 passed between our hands.

Home I went, excited and enthusiastic, anxious for first light.

With great care I hosed off the objective and cleaned the sand off the
rest of
the scope. The eyepieces, well, they needed cleaning but at least they
were
glass and brass and after a quick disassembly and some Windex they passed
light...

Now the mount, it was lacking a piece or two but nothing that could'nt be
fabricated with a hacksaw and a hammer.....


Fast forward to the Painted Rock Campground outside of Gila Bend, AZ,
early one
fall morning.

The moon was no where to be found and I had found Venus, bright and sharp
and I
could actually see that it was not a star. By this time, I had improved
the
mount but the scope still would not stay still or stay in place...

And then, there it was, was it a comet? that flash of light as I wobbled
past
it, unable to steady the scope adequately.

Just think, a comet near Venus....

Of course it took me about 15 minutes to convince myself that I was only
seeing
an errant reflection of Venus in the poor optics of this once new 60mm
nameless
department store refractor.

But by that time, I had happened upon something even more marvelous, I
wasn't
sure what it was, it wasn't till sometime later that I was really sure. A
tiny
bit of white haze surrounding some bright stars...

That morning, I had found for myself the Great Nebula in Orion and I was
hooked. That faint bit of nebulosity, that white haze, it was enough.

I was a goner.

Sometime later, that telescope was stolen by some fool from the second
story
balcony of our duplex.

And sometime after that, after another 60 mm refractor at another garage
sale,
came my first serious scope, a C-8 and sometime after than came another
garage
sale special, a Cometron Jr. 125mm ST Newt that was to put me over the
hump as
an enthusiastic starhopper.

And then came the first Dobsonian, a Pirate Instruments 8 incher with a
lead
weight that doubled as the mirror cell and counter balance...

But that first cold morning in the dark skies of the Arizona desert I got
that
glimpse of faint haze that has fueled my excitement ever since, sometimes
I
think my quest is simply to repeat the exitement of that first moment with
new,
fainter objects and bigger scopes and darker skies.

Yes,

Jon is getting a Telescope!!!

jon isaacs

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" wrote in message
...
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/

Eric wrote in message news:Je9jd.60460$VA5.32093@clgrps13...
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...

Tasco 6TE. 50mm f/12 refractor on the infamous alt-az table-top mount. I
still have the telescope. Looked at comet West (or was it Khoutek) when
I was about 6. Saturn, Jupiter (the GRS was actually RED), the moon. You
know what slowed me down ? School. I didn't buy another telescope for 20
years.

Eric.

That's my first "real" scope a Tasco 50mm 66te if I recall rightly,
from about 1968. Still have it and piggybacked it atop my C8 for Mars
in 2003, and using a UO Ortho instead of those poor eyepieces that
came with it. Result: Polar cap, central dark mass and lighter areas.
Had Mars been better situated for my lattitude I bet I could have seen
even a bit more.