This topic is locked
I reached out to longtime member Exnihilo,asking about his background in the hobby for our April restart. Paul's start was similar to many of us here with some notable exceptions. He had this to say.
" I started out in amateur astronomy at about age 12, working on a farm in the Denver suburbs. After that summer working, the next spring, I bought my first telescope, a Tasco 7te-5. My first real memory of using that telescope was, after figuring out how an equatorial mount worked, finding and seeing M13 for the first time. The bug had bitten me! Soon I was reading Sam Brown's "All About Telescopes" and was thinking about a bigger scope. After another couple of summers of farm work, I had enough saved to move on to my 2nd telescope. In order to have enough to get it though, i had to let go of the Tasco, something I still regret to this day.
That 2nd scope was an 8" Newtonian, it was one of the very first telescopes sold by S&S Optika, before they even opened their retail store. My dad and I built a small shed which allowed the 8" to roll out onto a small concrete platform for observing. I remember being out with the 8" on clear, bitter cold Denver nights with the snow all around, and the moonlight sparkling (well, some streetlight too). The mirror is all I have of that telescope today.
I left that telescope at home and headed off to college at New Mexico State, to pursue Physics. That's where I started seeing a curious, somewhat hunched back little old man, who everyone seemed to regard with great respect, walking around campus, who smiled at everyone, greeting many, including me, with a twinkle in his eye. I soon learned he was Clyde Tombaugh, who was at NM State as a professor emeritus. It turned out my High School chemistry teacher was a friend of Reta and Herb Beebe, also astronomy professors at NM State, who were naturally good friends of Clyde's. Reta was on the Voyager imaging team as well; it was the time when the Voyagers made the Saturn flybys. I sat in on a couple of Reta's planetary astronomy classes; Clyde would come and sit in the back of the small class of maybe 8-10 students, and could never resist telling one of his famous jokes.
I ended up getting a job at nearby White Sands Missle Range in order to make enough to finish college, and ended up going into a career in aerospace (hence the ICBM launch pic on my avatar), and so ended up becoming an aerospace engineer/rocket scientist instead of going into astronomy, but the astronomy bug was permanent! Clyde also had a hand in developing the optical tracking network at White Sands.
Reta Beebe is amazing, this is her wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia...wiki/Reta_Beebe
After college, I moved to California and got back into astronomy when I got my first SCT, a C8 Super Polaris, but let that go when I moved to Alabama some years later; it took moving to Arizona to convince me to again pursue the astronomy bug. These days I have several scopes, one of my favorites is the 6" Evostar which was originally owned by Chas; I had my son out one night with it not too long ago. Still waiting to get a really nice classic scope, wish I had kept that old Tasco! In the meantime I have several classic mounts to tinker with.
Dark Skies! "
Thanks Paul for sharing this of yourself. You've rubbed shoulders with some great influences along the way!
The basic guideline for this thread is to list ads and auctions for classic/vintage scopes and associated accessories that others may be interested in. Do not post your own ads or the ads of your friends, this includes items you may be trying to sell for someone else. We request that you do not post photos from ads. If you must have some reference to a photo in the post, post a link to the photo, not the photo itself. Concentrate on the item for sale, and not the seller.
Please post a live link to the item. Do not post "PM me for the link".Short discussions can take place about the items listed. When quoting a post, edit the quoted post to include only the part you are replying to. Do not post the entire ad text, or large blocks of it, without permission from the author. Keep on topic, please!
Buyer Beware- CN is not responsible for any of the ads or auctions posted here or their content. There are some scams floating around, so do your homework before pursuing any ad.
and this note from the moderators
Let's remember everybody, there's no one place that has all the best-used scope finds just as there's no one place that never has anything. All have something. No need to beat subjective matter, whatever the topic, into the ground. For the sake of all of us who love the classic forum, please keep moving the thread forward. Remember that many of your fellow forum members are already vintage themselves. Instead of restating your opinions over and over, consider sharing something new, insightful, or otherwise constructive to the topic at hand.
