I was up in the Smoke Mountains area a few weeks ago. We were driving over some foothills at night and I pulled over because I heard this area was one of the better dark sky areas. I was able to see Orion’s Nebula with my astronomical binoculars. It was just a fuzzy patch but it was very exciting. The Pleiades were gorgeous through the binoculars. For someone who lived in the NE Corridor and out in the West Coast with light polluted skies seeing these objects and the some semblance of the Milky Way was very exciting.
A friend of a friend of mine has an amateur observatory near there. I’ve seen pictures of his setup and it’s very professional looking. He gets some great views, especially during the winter when the skies are clear.
My friend will go there for the Great Solar Eclipse that will pass diagonally across the US in 2017. More details and map of totality here:
http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/path_through_the_US.htm
My best friend ran a company where one of the co-owners was into making telescopes. At company meetings they would polish this big glass disc by pushing it back and forth, rotate and repeat, on some bed full of polishing compound. Took quite awhile to get it just right.
Then the guy had it mirror coated and mounted it into a tube used to pour concrete, it was about 2ft diameter. They built a stand to hold it in and mounted an eyepiece at the upper end. This thing was about 16 feet long and you had to stand on a ladder to look through the eyepiece.
The had it trained on Orion’s Nebula when I got my chance to look through it. Never gonna forget how that looked, just like todays’ APOD.