who remembers the old days ..

[mt01]

do you remember being about 12 or 13 , and looking through your dads bino`s on holiday , looking at the stars and the moon and thinking wow .... so eventually you get hold of a small refracter , about 3" i think , outside freezing with the wobbly mount looking at saturn and finding your own way about the stars , learning constellations ect ,

and as you grow older your skills increase slowly and eventually by my mid 20`s i thought about a bigger scope .. so i done my reseach and got hold of 6" reflector , all my years of starhopping and learning proved good as found amazing dso`s with my new scope

now im into my 40`s , house ,career , children ect , i think i have the knowledge to use a big scope .... i have done an apprenticship in astronomy long enough .

i wonder then how people are faring on here who have never had a scope before and cant tell the difference between an az/alt and eq .. who dont know that focal lenght divided by ep = mag ect ,but have went out and bought huge complicated expensive scopes and eq mounts, and have decided they want to do long exposure photography !

dont get me wrong ..best of luck to those who have ... but judging from the amount of "how do i ..." posts that are on here i think most people would benifit from starting out with a small simple scope and learning how to , i personally dont envy someone with no experience of goto or guiding or ccd`s or polar ailgnment ,eq mounts , or focal reducers ect , ect , buying thousands of pounds worth of kit and then facing a huge learning curve worth at least a uni degree , they must be thinking what have i done .....

anyway little bit at a time is what i say

[Jon Sales]

I remember the good old days when children worked in factories

[dtr42]

i am one of those newbies ,i started with a scope about 25-30 yrs ago 3" refractor on a cheap mount saw the moon and that was it ,then kids family etc come along and astronomy is about number 100 on a to do list of 101 things. fast forward to 1-2 years ago ,got some free time from kids, working long hours etc and get a set of bins ,so have for last year went round the planets/moon some star hoping and found that i realy like the astronomy lark . so get a scope [*8"dob] after asking and reading on this and other net site's and get out there but to be honest i still dont know my declanation from my arm . If i had the money i would buy the 30" dobsonian that i envy and would still do the things i like to do [planets/moon etc] but i am not realy intrested in learning my "craft" and if a polar aligned goto was in my price range i would get one . if you want to learn the hobby then feel free if others come on here with a how do I ,or can anyone help then surely the easy option is to help if you can [and with a better knowledge base then that advice may or should be helpful]

[John]

The choice of equipment in the 1980's (when I first got seriously interested) was much poorer than it is today and the cost of anything decent (ie: not a "department store scope") was relatively speaking, much higher than it is today.

I think the phase "you have never had it so good" could aptly be used for the choice of astro equipment available today

I think the last workhouses closed around 1948 so I can't remember that

[steve_bham]

I remember the basic scopes, saved for a year to by a beacon hill 8" dob scope and hated it lol, really put me off astronomy for many years, then got a small goto and loved every minute of it.

Having much more choice is a great thing, I have very limited time to view the sky and the more time I'm looking at an object in the eyepiece than trying to find it the better.

[Grunthos]

I remember the good old days when children worked in factories

Factories?

You was lucky lad!

We used to dream of factories...

[dtr42]

oh it's turning into monty pythons:)

Monty Python's Flying Circus - "Four Yorkshiremen"

[malc-c]

I remember the good old days when children worked in factories

Whats a factory...

Seem these are rare things these days....

The thing I remember about "the good ol' days", well being seven when they landed on the moon, it was the sudden coverage of things scientific on TV - There was Tomorrows World, the Burke specials (Jame Burke), and then Horizon on BBC2. As kids we wondered where man would be at the turn of the century (some 30 years away at the time) with talk of bases on the Moon etc a possibility.

I do remember wincing when I shelled out over a grand for my first real scope, a Vixen 102 with driven mount, back in the late '80s. These days you get more scope per GBP than you did back then.

[Tinker1947]

I remember thick cardboard tram tickets....

[cotterless45]

I remember at school when a 6" Newtonian was out of most folks reach, changed times.

[Citizen]

looking through your dads bino`s on holiday , looking at the stars and the moon and thinking wow ....

Stars you say?! I remember when all this <waves hand across the sky) was all just protons and electrons.

[dtr42]

Stars you say?! I remember when all this <waves hand across the sky) was all just protons and electrons.

lol

protons and electrons you say i remember when there was only black, it was so black even the white bits were black:)

[shellfish]

oh it's turning into monty pythons:)

Monty Python's Flying Circus - "Four Yorkshiremen"

FOUR Yorkshireme... FOUR you say... Why when I was a lad we never had FOUR Yorkshiremen........

[m1ck]

like that one buddy. [dtr42] LOL.

[m1ck]

PYTHON FANS OR WAT .

[dtr42]

python fans you say, what about those folk who prefer adders or rattlesnakes its just plain old snake discrimination

[SeedyF]

I'm not one to buy into all this "good old days" stuff. Not so long ago you had to wash clothes by hand, I don't see many people scoffing at an automatic washing machine and moaning that kids these days don't know how to wash clothes.

Things progress and newbs have a different starting point to the one we may have had, it's life and it's not their fault. We as a community should be embracing the advantages that these advancements bring. Not wishing everyone had it "tough" like we did.

In my opinion anyway

[shellfish]

To those folk we say "Go away before we taunt you a Second time"...... in a slightly French accent lol

[lukebl]

I remember being a kid in the 1970s having to be contented with my 60mm refractor which was all we could afford, and poring over my copies of Sky and Telescope magazine (which I had by subscription from the US, which seemed really exotic to me), and thinking that one day I would have something as big and impressive as this Dynascope. Not sure if it was any good, but it looked really impressive to me at the time and was completely unaffordable to us (not sure what $229.95 was worth in 1975, but I think it was a lot to us). Still have the magazines in the loo!

As John says, these days we've never had it so good as far as choice and prices go.

Eee bah gum.

[dtr42]

:)

To those folk we say "Go away before we taunt you a Second time"...... in a slightly French accent lol

[dtr42]

i would buy that today it looks like a telescope should:)

I remember being a kid in the 1970s having to be contented with my 60mm refractor which was all we could afford, and poring over my copies of Sky and Telescope magazine (which I had by subscription from the US, which seemed really exotic to me), and thinking that one day I would have something as big and impressive as this Dynascope. Not sure if it was any good, but it looked really impressive to me at the time and was completely unaffordable to us (not sure what $229.95 was worth in 1975, but I think it was a lot to us). Still have the magazines in the loo!

As John says, these days we've never had it so good as far as choice and prices go.

[ATTACH]81870[/ATTACH]

Eee bah gum.

[bish]

I thought my 60mm refractor was great because I could see the craters on the moon. I seem to recall it had like a click stop zoom type eyepiece x25, x50 and x75. I saw a tasco advertised in a catlogue that went up to x500 or so and had a finderscope! Thought they must be the best thing ever. Things are much better these days.

[Monki]

It can be annoying, i'll agree with that.

To see a rank amateur spend hundreds or thousands on a scope and know nothing about it seems daft. But to think about it realisticly, what these people do doesn't affect anyone...bar the availability of stock in some circumstances (stargazing live). The stars are not going anywhere, and they are free to observe

I'm a telescope newbie as of christmas last year. I've asked questions on here, but i've also spent a very long time reading for myself trying to learn about the stars, telescopes and the maths involved in optics..with various physics knowledge learned along the way.

I've always been interested in astronomy but never did anything about it.. luckily my girlfriend suprised me with a celestron 60mm f12 goto, alt-az. It's perfect. It may not be a 10"+ monster on an expensive EQ mount but i love every single thing i see through my scope ..the bat wings taking shape in m42...my first dc- ngc869/884.. to the faint grey smuge i saw when trying to view m31 behind a street lamp hehe....and much more...

To think about it positively...we can either have genuine people wanting to learn about this amazing experience called stargazing and astronomy, or we can have people who buy into something they know nothing about only sell their expensive scope 2 months later for cheap

Either is good

Sent from a Galaxy S 2 far away.

[Islander]

I thought my 60mm refractor was great because I could see the craters on the moon. I seem to recall it had like a click stop zoom type eyepiece x25, x50 and x75. I saw a tasco advertised in a catlogue that went up to x500 or so and had a finderscope! Thought they must be the best thing ever. Things are much better these days.

I had one of those when I was a kid - I used to rest the flimsy tripod that came with it on the top of an old Anderson shelter in my back garden. It gave me a reasonable introduction to the night sky

Oh and protons and electrons? Pah. I remember when it was all top and bottom quarks

[mt01]

monki , i like your philosophy ... spot on