Telescope Reviews: The Astronomer Looks at 55

Great article. I have been mentally cobbling something similar, thinking to post it some day... thanks for getting there "fustest with the mostest." The 2 points you made that got me especially were (1) the milieu of those Space Age days...the Gilbert Chemistry and microscope sets, the experiments with voltmeters and Van de Graaf generators you could get cheap from Edmund's...they were our versions of the carnage-based Nintendo and computer "games" of today. Remember the International Geophysical Year? (That's rhetorical, Unk; I'm a couple of years older than you) You were "cool" if you could just pronounce it! Disney - who was worhipped by us kids in the 50's - had Wernher von Braun showing models of rockets & space stations; you begged your folks to let you go to the movies & see those great (and vanished!) B space-alien movies. When Alan Shepard took his brief ride into space, all school activities were stopped and the entire flight was piped into every classroom on the PA. And those S&T ads...we all knew focal length was the distance from the lens up front to the eyepiece at the back, or from the eyepiece up front to the mirror in the back. Then how could a 50" focal length scope be only 6" long? And there was no finder scope - but there WAS a finder scope! It was mysterious, almost magical ...and that was just the inside front cover!

The other point was the one about what we observe. I recently saw an old Unitron ad that consisted entirely of dozens of testimonials written by owners. Letter after letter about the planets, the moon, once in a while about splitting doubles or observing variables... but faint galaxies? Forget it! With the growing interest in DSO's (and the increasing light pollution) it became necessary to travel longer & longer distances to pursue the hobby - which used to be known as "backyard astronomy."

The future? You need a certain set of "receptors" for astronomy and one of them is enough patience to wait for good observing conditions, and an ability to look past the time-exposure photographs & appreciate what the scope shows you...and the depredations of computers et al have made their erosions into the set of potential newbies (the same is true of audio - remember those great McIntosh amps and Garrard turntables with Afromosia wood tonearms? All part of another era!).

Thanks again for a wonderful article!