Posts Made By: James C Chandler Jr

Hi Dan

This AP part-- "2" Adapter with Brass Locking Ring and 3 Large Thumbscrews - for larger SCTs with 3.25" Rear Cell, (ADASCTLC and ADASCTLM)

Near the bottom of this page--

http://www.astro-physics.com/index.htm?products/telescopes/160edf/160edf

It seems popular, and I like mine on a CPC1100. I use it usually with an ordinary refractor-style dielectric diagonal. It is very heavy duty and well-made.

Looking thru the AP adapter into the SCT back-baffle, the back-baffle is 'very near' 2" aperture (slightly conical). So this AP adapter preserves a 2" opening all the way back to the diagonal. Of course the aperture would be slightly smaller inside the diagonal.

Michael Koons said:

How about tort choices for insurance policies, like in auto......? Oops I forget how the insurance companies and attorneys screamed around 15 years ago in PA when it was implemented....
How about throwing people with like lifestyles in the same pot of insured so I don't subsidize smokers, drug users etc? Think some premium jumps for the less healthy would cause them to pay, modify their behavior or ditch their policies?
Just looking for some big picture starting points before we leap to sinble payor with the same old problems.

There is high risk auto insurance, expensive, for the bad drivers. Not necessarily bad if the insurance companies HAVE to take you, as long as you can afford to pay the price for the group policy.

Years ago did long boring jury duty with a PhD math guy, nice bright amiable fellow, who did actuarial work for an insurance company. PERHAPS just tell the insurance companies they have to insure everybody in some kind of group, no rejections. Let the insurance company wonks calculate the price. Don't let Nancy Pelosi calculate the price. If insurance company A can make money on the same group with a slightly lower price than company B, then company A will get more biz assuming their actuarial wonks are worth the money and company A stays in biz.

You do realize that opening the door to special groups, will put extraordinarily thin people in a more-expensive group than normal-weight people? Why can't certain races with certain tendency toward genetic diseases go into special groups? Why should an Asian pay for all the White folks' Parkinson Disease proclivity?

Male gays can't complain when they get dumped in a special high-risk group, if the actuaries find that they actually are more expensive as a group. I'm not saying gays are higher-risk, or that they are not in a higher-risk group. But if yer gonna charge extra for smokers (with proper evidence), then you can't reasonably protect gays or sky-divers from equivalent higher costs, can you? Assuming the actuaries have evidence?

What about folks with genetic predispositions? Put women with a breast cancer chromasome in a high-risk group?

It is a can of worms, perhaps not worth opening. Perhaps better just to pay for the smokers and gluttons?

A lot of people started forwarding all their junk mail to [email protected]

Before the whitehouse pulled the plug, wonder how many hundreds of thousands of nigerian banker, fake drugstore, porn and gambling ads were received? Well at least somebody got stimulus money for reading all that junk.

"Modern" power brakes are wonderful inventions.

I had non-power brakes in a front heavy 1967 Camaro. Think it was just drum brakes on all four wheels, but I know nothing of autos except where to put the gas.

The Camaro brakes were not really dangerous as it stopped every time, but they felt dangerous. Really had to stand on the brake pedal. The braking dynamics felt disturbing even after owning that car for years. It never felt like it was decelerating quickly enough, and the closer I'd get to the stop, the more I'd have to stand on the brakes.

No power steering with a 327 sitting over the front wheels. A little tiresome to steer slow, but no problem fast. Hydromatic 2 speed transmission that would run 90 miles per hour on the interstate all night long. 90 mph in second gear. hmm. It got about 13 miles per gallon, about twice as efficient as your truck.

Edit: Dunno much about it, but maybe the transmission was a Powerglide. Wikipedia says all the Hydramatics were at least 3 speed.

Chevy did a recall because of motor mount failures. They didn't replace the motor mounts. The dealer just tied wire rope around the motor mounts. If the mounts cracked off, the cables were supposed to keep the motor from falling all the way out of the car into the road.

Loved that car and drove it about 7 years. Shouldn't have ever given it to little sister. Sis loved it too. Sis drove the snot out of that Camaro many years till she finally broke the rear axle and abandoned it on the side of the road outside Atlanta.

Heard it said that the AARP leadership is "MoveOn.org with dentures"

Years ago mom was sayin, "AARP is nothing but an insurance scam."

When we turned 55, wife wanted those wonderful senior citizen AARP discounts and signed us up. They drowned us with insurance junk mail until we cancelled the membership. What a bargain-- Pay dues for the privilege of receiving 10 trees worth of junk mail, while they use the dues money to lobby a commie agenda.

On the other hand, if one's ambition is to kill trees-- Just send a single $5 check each to: AARP, Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, SPLC, NRA, DNC, RNC. In return for your $40 investment, these organizations will wipe out yer own personal forest in junk mail within a year!

Daniel White said:

Earlier I asked for opinions on lightweight wide field 2" eyepieces. I have
since read about the new astro-tech titan II eyepieces. Anyone have experience with these? Are
they a clone of some other eyepiece? Thanks!

Hi Daniel

I don't have experience with the titan II. Some have suggested it may be a paragon clone. The unusually light weight, number of elements, and some other specs do seem unusually similar between the Titan II and Paragon. Though in this case, IF it is a clone, the clone may be as good or better-made than the original. Idle ignorant speculation.

Have been tempted to get a Titan II, but have not yet.

I dunno much about it, but have been pleased with the quality of the Stellarvue 80mm F80 finder. The F 3.75 one. SV also makes a longer F-Ratio 'super finder' that is a variant of a Night Hawk, significantly more expensive.

I like the F 3.75 finder as a general-duty small telescope. Being so fast, it wouldn't likely be great for real high power, but seems fine for low power wide fields. Perhaps nobody bothers to make apo refractors that fast because the results would be doomed to be somewhat disappointing? But a really fast short focal length seems about the only thing capable of really wide fields.

The 50mm finders in the F4 ballpark can get a wider field, though. Depends on what purpose you want the thing, maybe.

Pictures of the Antares look like maybe they come from the same factory as the SV. But the SV features seem slightly better as best I can tell.

The Lumicon 80mm finder, as best I can tell from the photos, uses a modular helical focuser in-line with the scope (in front of the diagonal), rather than the SV helical focuser on the back-end of the diagonal. That Lumicon arrangement may be more flexible, because it seems to invite easier modifications with different diagonals or whatever. But if you don't care to experiment with the hardware, the additional potential flexibility wouldn't matter.

If you have plenty of money, you can build nice little finders out of Borg parts.

That is clever use of hardware store hinges! The perfect part for the job..

Hi Linton

Dunno where that came from, but agenaastro.com has a lot of decent-enough relatively inexpensive adapters. I bought a few and didn't have complaints. It is a wild guess, but maybe some of the agenaastro adapters are GSO. They carry a lot of GSO thangs.

A visit to Anaheim awhile ago wasn't too bad. Lots better than Chicago.

It appeared customary to drive bumper-to-bumper 20 miles above the speed limit during rush hour. Rush hour seemed to start about 4 am. Rental cars had special license plate numbers easily ID'd by police, who seemed to prefer stopping ferriners in rental cars. Stay with the traffic flow and risk a ticket, or obey the speed limit and get run over .

Restaurant food was pretty good. One could find grits on breakfast menus and it didn't obviously gross-out the waitress, though my Canadian friends viewed grits as a strange bacterial specimen.