Posts Made By: George Blahun

I have a KU Band satellite receiver and was looking at the raw feed of MSNBC practicing for the election night graphics and, no surprise, Obama Won! Don't worry Richard, I won't count this as accurate until Tuesday or Wednesday.

George

How could all the people involved in filming a TV commercial get this so completely wrong?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWmhk6PbUDM

Michael:
Here is my opinion, others may disagree. The blue VISAC sticker probably came off the secondary mirror mount and landed on the primary. The set screw should not have come off during normal shipping if it was affixed properly. When I ship items, I either insure them or assume responsibility for their arriving in good working order. If you think the professional cleaning would correct the issue, then I would accept the offer of the seller. If I were the seller, I would have allowed you to choose between professional cleaning or returning the item to me. It's difficult to know if the packing was sufficient, but the set screw issue and the sticker are not something you should assume responsibility for. Either the shipper or the seller should take care of the problem to your satisfaction.

George

I suspect there is a relationship between disposable income and space available. If you plot those figures on a graph, the line they form represents the number of scopes you can have. I believe the relationship is linear, but I could be wrong. :>)

George

Gary:
If you feel comfortable doing so, you can remove the front panel with the power connector jack and look for an internal fuse. At worst, a few capacitors are blown and at best a simple fuse. When putting it back together, you (or whoever fixes it) could wire in a reverse connected diode to prevent this from happening again. You probably have about $5 in parts damaged. I'm not aware of anyone close to you who could do this, but you could try a radio tv repair store since the power supply is pretty basic and any damage is likely limited to it. You could send it to one of the repair guys like DR. Clay, but the shipping alone would be pretty steep.

I should clarify my above comments by saying the internal power connection is what should be looked at, not the external one. The panel on the mount can be removed and inspected, there are secondary supplies inside supplying voltages for various areas of the mount.

George

With all the other political discussions going on here at AM, this may have escaped the attention of many: China has soft landed a craft on the moon and is planning a lunar base. Am I living in the past with the view, which was repeated many times in the 50s and 60s, "He who controls the moon, controls the earth"? I still think there is some truth to this. Granted we have a space station, although it's not the big wheel I hoped for with artificial gravity. The moon, though, is different. Hard to get to, but easy to launch objects from. I'm not all paranoid about the Chinese getting a base there to hit us with missiles, I just don't want to look back in 20 years and say we should have kept up with them with respect to presence on the moon. I know there are plenty of other concerns, financially and otherwise, but a joint government and private venture to establish a moon base is in the best interest of the US.

Photo below, courtesy of WIKIPEDIA.

You probably won't hear much about this unless you live in CT, but this Tuesday will mark the 60th anniversary of the launching of SSN 571, better known as the Nautilus. I live almost directly across the river from the Nautilus Museum (worth a visit if you are ever in SE CT). In the 1950s one of my classmates at Quaker Hill Grammar School was Rodney Wilkinson, the youngest son of then Captain Eugene Wilkinson. When parents would come in to describe their jobs, it was almost surreal to see, standing before our class, Capt. Wilkinson explain how he was Captain of the first nuclear powered submarine. All of us thought it was very cool to have a guy in class who was on TV too. Our 3rd grade class was actually invited (with only permission slips from parents) to tour the Nautilus. Those were the days when law suits were few and playground equipment was really fun to use. Vice Admiral Wilkinson died this past July, but I remember the days when he lived up the road from us, like it was yesterday.
I don't think many of us kids fully appreciated the significance of the Nautilus until later in life. We did all realize we were the number two site for a Soviet nuclear attack in the 50s due to all the subs lined up across the river. Most of us thought about this during the "duck and cover" drills, although I'm not sure how many realized we would be turned into atoms ourselves if an attack ever happened. Anyhow, the world really changed in many ways after the Nautilus, those guys on board certainly had balls, especially when they headed under the North Pole. There are only a handful of the original crew left. Their accomplishments, however, will live forever.

Billy, I'm guessing from your post you have a classic C5? I'm pretty sure Celestron made an optional diagonal that would accommodate .96, 1.25 and 2 inch eyepieces. The threads on the visual back should permit a little more aperture in the diagonal choice. Candidly, 28 bucks for a diagonal is not going to make the most of the good optics in your scope. I no longer own any Celestron scopes so I can't make any suggestions about specific diagonals, but I'd stay away from cheap accessories.

George

You right wingers are such hypocrites. Where were your voices in 1983 when 241 Marines were killed in Beirut due to poor security and knowing of an obvious threat. There was little call for Reagan to step down for that incompetence. Of course most Republicans then were all too happy to forget those dead Marines and distract the World with the invasion of Grenada.
Your complaints about Benghazi have less to do with the unfortunate deaths and more to do with your grudge against anything remotely related to Obama. To suggest that those who might vote for Clinton should have their families tortured is the kind of mindless bullshit I've come to expect from the Tea Bagger crowd.

https://nextgenclimate.org/hotseat/

Ya can't argue with the facts.