Little old telescope

[Brass n glass]

You know you're getting old when something you owned when you were young turns up for sale listed under "collectables". A few weeks ago a Britex Fetherlite 20X35 telescope appeared on the Camera House website. It was the first model of telescope I ever had and last Friday was the 50th anniversary of my parents giving it to me. I never expected to see another because they were a bit fragile. They were made of a very thin light alloy with cardboard internal lens mounts when most British telescopes were still made mainly of heavy brass.

I've been using the Camera House one over the past few nights using the same mounts as 50 years ago - any convenient branch or fence post. My first impression was "How did I ever see anything with one of these?" The field of view is tiny and the image through the uncoated lenses is very dim. But as with a lot of old handhold telescopes the little cemented achromatic doublet gives a beautifully crisp image snd the tight baffling eliminates a lot of false colour. And it's so light that even without a proper mount it's reasonably comfortable to use. At 262gms the scope weighs a lot less than a modern Hyperion eyepiece. Saturn's rings show up clearly and it can manage a few DSOs below the naked-eye threshold. It certainly got me going all those years ago and it was nice to meet the model again. I imagine most of them have fallen apart by now.