Generally I agree , but actually Shrine Manons and Mayflower 814s were at times the exact same scope with both having examples made by HOC and APL over several years. Mayflower later used SYW for the same style of scope but by that time Manon appeared to have shut down. That's why some parts look the same but aren't interchangeable. The Bushnell Sky Chief Jr. was at one time made by APL (and likely HOC) as well, and like Mayflower later by SYW.
It's all so complicated and not only with the examples sighted above, that I wouldn't know when the OP would want to make a distinction between a maker and a brand.
The challenge is that many of the parts were made by small shops that aren't named, and then "manufacturers" assembled them in different configurations. Is Shrine Manon not a manufacturer because they only sold a unique combination of these parts? Would you only consider their manufacturers to be their objective makers (HOC, APL, and Towa at different times)? Mayflower sold a similar scope with a somewhat different version of the mount. Bushnell sold yet another variation, in a different color scheme, and the objective maker's mark replaced with BOL.
The "importers" generally went to Japan and negotiated with a company to subcontract the part-making and then build a model that would be distinct to them. Unitron got Nihon-Seiko to do this for them, and we still don't know who NS actually got the objectives from. But Unitron got the ball rolling and then NS sold the same models in other countries as Polarex. Meade even got NS to supply some of their early refractors. Do we list Unitron or NS or both? Astro-Optical built scopes for Tasco, and for Sears with a unique variation on the same mount, and provided the same OTA for a Mayflower model that was put on a completely different mount from a different source. Who is the manufacturer of the Mayflower? AO also sold the Tasco version separately as Royal. Again, who do we choose to list?
It wasn't like having some company selling a GSO refractor with their logo painted on it. There was a lot more collaboration and crossovers among components, which blurs the distinctions between manufacturers.
Chip W.
Alright, both of those are actually good points which I hadn't considered. So perhaps at this point since this project is still in an early stage, it is probably best to just aggregate all the companies that sold have sold telescopes from the late 70s to present. We can sort out the significance of each individual company's catalogs as we go.
The end goal is to create a somewhat comprehensive datasheet of all of the desirable or highly-collectible telescopes from the used market, starting with classic telescopes and going all the way up to recent years, and aggregate as much info on the products as possible -- optical system, optical glass quality, housing/enclosure quality, electronics & quality/reliability of electronics extra/peripheral/novelty features, opinions/reviews from owners, reported prices when bought/sold, etc.
All of this was to hopefully be useful in creating a wiki site for individual telescopes, similar to the RigPix database for amateur radios. I am working on this project on-and-off with a friend of mine, and he has already aggregated a large amount of data on telescopes which have been sold by the manufacturers listed in post #1 within the last 15 years or so. We decided now would be a good time to try and get a decent list of more "classic" telescope makers so that we could start getting data from their product catalogs.
Edited by ittryn, 11 October 2024 - 08:46 AM.
