Telescope Reviews: Hi all, newbie to the forum

Thanx all. Bierbelly? Oh, I just sort of picked that out of the air, so to speak. No particular reason.

My Vega is f/4 (8" x 32"). I did post a pic in the Classic Telescopes forum. The story behind me getting this scope is kinda interesting. So read on if you're bored.

I was working as a paperboy in the late 60's and had been grinding my own mirror from Edmund. When I finally got paying work (the paper route) I decided to save some money and just buy a 6" from Edmund ($200 at the time for the least expensive one). Well, browsing through the Wash Post one morning, and saw an advertisment for an 8" telescope for, low and behold, $200. Coaxed my dad to take me to see it. Found it in a used furniture store, where it had apparently be purchased as a piece of someone's estate. The store owner didn't even know how to open it, but did know something was broken on the scope. My dad, having been a machinist, looked at it, and immediately pulled out his credit card, which was something I'd never seen before...credit cards were pretty new at that time. Got it home, and the broken part was merely the drive shaft which extended from the base to the EQ mount...easy fix for a machinist. Got a bunch of eyepieces too. One of those huge, wide angle war surplus eyepieces, a 20mm Erfle, 20mm, 10mm and 6mm Orthos and two barlows 2X and 5X.

Well, many years later family brought on some hard times and I looked into selling the scope. Listed it in S&T back in the mid 80's. No buyers (thank god), but one interested party called me from Canada. This guy had a 6" Vega and called to find out if mine was really an 8". He said he wasn't even aware that the Vega company ever made an 8". He photocopied the owner's manual for me, which indicated that the 6" originally sold for like $1795, and listed the company owner's name as Robert Jones. I finally got up the nerve to call all the Robert Jones' in Palo Alto (which is where the scope was built), and got lucky on the first call. Got Mr. Jones out of the pool. We talked a while. He told me that he had only made about 39 telescopes in all, and that only two were 8" scopes. He seemed to recall selling them for about $3K. He was sure that one was sold to a sugar company president, who donated it to a school in American Samoa...so he figured I had the other one, but he couldn't remember to whom it was sold nor had he any idea how it got to the Wash DC area.

Nuff said.

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12" DSH
8" f/4 Vega MakNewt
6" MN66
TV85