Posted on 04/08/2014 10:38:50 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
>>Who needs a fancy newfangled quiet coffee grinder when the loud one still has some life left in her?
She appears to be tracking nicely! I’m going to guess it’s Meade LX200? Back 20-sometehing years ago I worked for Meade’s chief rival.
You got it, LX200 Classic, no fancy GPS, autostar, or “ACF” optics. I assume by the chief rival you mean Celestron? They seem to have fared better than Meade over the years. I still wouldn’t trade my LX200 for anything though. Just got a used SBIG and I may get a fancier wide field refractor for it at some point, but the base telescope it’s riding on will remain the same for as long as it lives.
Yep, worked at Celestron way back when. I was the block maker, and worked in the matching room before that. I liked the work, but the pay was lousy.
One of my favorite parts of the job was our yearly factory sale, when we’d sell all of our “junk.” I’d get the before and after sale deals. I also drove the truck for the Riverside Telescope Maker’s Convention, and was always there manning our tables. Those were fun times.
Amateur astronomy has filled my life with fun and adventure.
Oh, and as far as my rig.... been using the same 14.5” f5.5 Newt for about 20 years now. Sono tube, Dob mount, Osypowsky equatorial platform. It’s strictly a visual rig. The focus is so close to the tube that there’s no way you could get a camera to focus anyway. :)
Oh that’s nice, I love big Dobs. I live in an apartment and don’t have room for such a thing, I need maximum portability in my setup, plus I got bit by the photography bug.
Schmidt Cass scopes are great for photography. You can hang all kinds of stuff on the short tube without throwing the whole thing out of kilter, and you can push the focus way out of the tube to reach focus for just about any camera. Newts get out of balance so easily, and when optimized for planetary viewing you can’t even use a binocular viewer without using a Barlow to push the focus further out of the tube.
I used to take our (Celestron’s) new scopes home for testing and evaluation, and I enjoyed all of the gadgets that you could use with a Cass. From 5” to 14”, and even a 22” which was very rare, I got to play with them.
That was back when the internet was just getting started in the early 90’s, and I was our unofficial “rep” on Genie and Compuserve.
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