I say that I'm a Night Time Sky Watcher rather than an amateur astronomer. It seems to me that if you read publications like Sky and Telescope, a great portion of their copy refers to things like "New Coronal Mass Calculations", "Another XUZ radiant micro dwarf found 100 billion miles away", these things don't interest me. I like looking at the night sky and testing myself and my telescopes in the observing process.
I admit it I like stuff, toys, machines, and especially nice optics. I like nice camera optics, and telescope optics, and probably any other optics you can think of. Think of it; through about the last 500 years or so, man has taken sand, made glass and experimented with it in different shapes and combinations to make lenses. The lenses bend light, the image to correct vision, take photos, explore the microscopic world and probe the heavens. In my mind, never has so little done so much; except maybe the computer chip, also sand!
The first telescope I bought was a goodwill special for $40, sadly I found out that the haze I saw on the mirror was not dirt but a loss of silvering, a non-repairable condition. It did show Kari and I a full moon eclipse and got me started on "Astronomy".
There is more to the story and history of my night time observation, but I'll leave it here for now.
The Line Up
My first real, store bought telescope.
A 90mm Orion Maksutov Cassegrain on an equatorial mount, it now resides in Florida
My second real store bought telescope
A 80mm Orion Short Tube refractor also on an equatorial mount, but portable, also in Florida
The third Scope
The canon, an Orion 8" Dobsonian reflector with a computerized push to mount
The fourth scope, the "Nighhawk" a 66mm William Optics ED refractor with Crayford focuser.
In between and after each of these I picked up various other Goodwill and post Christmas sale scopes.
A Meade ETX AT60, a 60mm goto scope, I still own it and enjoy it
A Meade ETX AT80, actually, 3 of them, each was returned. They were OK, the computer was the best part, but the optics suffered
A Meade DS2090, a 90mm long tube on a great goto mount, I still have but don't use the scope. I love the mount for use with my William Optics "Nighthawk".
A Meade 70mm digiscope refractor without the controller.
A Meade 130mm reflector on an Equatorial mount
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