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For the July restart I reached out to long time member,davidmcgo, to find out how he got interested in the hobby and classics.Dave had this to share.
"I didn’t get interested in classic scopes as a vintage thing so much as I mainly gravitated towards the unobtanium that graced the ads in Sky and Telescope back around 1980, when I first got interested. I was a pre teen hooked on anything space, Apollo, Skylab, the then fledgling Space Shuttle, the Voyager encounters at Jupiter and Saturn, and oh yeah, Cosmos on the local PBS station. My first telescope was a Tasco 6TE-5 that belonged to my oldest sister’s boyfriend. I guess he wanted me out of their hair, but when I realized I could actually see all this stuff first hand, I was hooked!
I had a hodgepodge of pretty simple stuff early on, a Tuthill Star Trap RFT, a C90 spotter, and a 5” RFT refractor I made with a surplus 27” f5.6 aerial camera lens. Eventually I traded up to a Coulter Odyssey 8, then a 1975 sand cast C8 in 1990. So not a classic back then, just a 15 year old cat. But it had really well corrected optics and is still in my stable today.
Early on while I still had just the little borrowed Tasco, my dad took me to the local university when they had an open house. I remember climbing up a spiral staircase onto the roof of the physics building and then into a small dome. The dome had a Celestron blue and white C10 and it was aimed at the just past first quarter moon. I still remember the view now. Huge, sharp, bright and so. Beyond anything I could see at the time. When one of these showed up in a CN ad back in 2004 or 2005 from Bill Cook, I just had to have it. I had Craters and Freighters pick it up at Captain’s Nautical, build a wood crate, and ship it down to San Diego.
It needed some work so I had the mirrors recoated, a new backplate machined, and later scrounged up the portable pier and matching guide scope with tangent coupler. So that was the first scope I bought as a classic per se. Since then I have added a 1976 sand cast C5, 1982 Celestron C11 inherited from a dear friend, an original Comet Catcher, Meade 2044, a Unitron 114, and a Questar 3.5.
They all get a decent amount of use, mainly at home for casual viewing. I love time away from the computer and a vintage scope, paper star atlas, and a quiet evening pondering the infinite is always a nice break. The optics in these satisfy me every bit as much as the new stuff, and they feel much longer lasting than a lot of the modern equipment.
Thanks much Dave, for sharing this of yourself .Great pictures as well.
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