Other

Putting a fork into myths about Hubble's Galaxy classification

In the current model of the Universe favored by most cosmologists the composition of the Universe is ~4.5% visible (baryonic) matter, 22.7% non-baryonic dark matter, and 72.8% dark energy...

... a beautiful grassy field for tent campers ( empty ), spotlessly clean bathrooms with hot showers, very nice camp sites with some shade trees right by the grassy field, a nice restaurant ... and if that wasn’t enough ... a challenging, well maintained 18 hole golf course! All this under the darkest skies in the US.

The definition of a planet and where the division is between Solar System objects that are planets and those that are not planets is currently in a state of disagreement among scientists.

In the summer of 1997, on my quest to interview the great commercial telescope makers in American history for a book, I made a pilgrimage to one of the most famous small towns in telescope history: New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Tales of Movie Stars and Mogey Refractors

In August 1997, the rumors were flying among amateur astronomy circles about the demise of Unitron. Certainly, their ads had long disappeared from the pages of magazines they once graced, such as Sky and Telescope...

The first time I saw a Tele Vue refractor was when I was responding to an ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1995 for a Brandon 94mm refractor. I drove to the seller’s home in Mentor-on-the-Lake, and admired the baby-blue Brandon on a Unitron alt-azimuth mount, set up on the back porch overlooking Lake Erie. But another telescope next to it really took my breath away. It was a brass Renaissance on a Tele Vue Panoramic mount. “Are you selling that one?” I asked. I liked the Brandon. But I really wanted the Renaissance. I ended up buying both.

The first in a running series :-)

In the world of commercial telescopes, if Byers mounts are the Mack trucks of telescope mounts, then Losmandy mounts are the Dodge Ram trucks. The two companies are only located about 120 miles apart, in North Hollywood and Barstow, but both seemed on the other side of the world from each other, in scale, size, market and old school and new school philosophy.

But after visiting Norman and Robert Edmund, I had a choice. Go see the sights in Philadelphia, like the U.S. Mint and Independence Hall, with my wife? Or spend the afternoon at D&G Optical talking to Barry Greiner about telescopes?

On a trip to Southern California in June 1997 to track down some of the influential figures in the history of commercial telescopes, I hoped to find Steve Kufeld, the inventor of the world-famous Telrad telescope sighting device.

In the spring of 1998, Tom Johnson was living a comfortable life in retirement in Palm Springs, Calif., after being out of the telescope wars for some 18 years and having sold Celestron to Diethelm Holding Co. of Zurich.

Before World War II, if you were well-to-do and wanted a telescope, you could buy one from Tinsley Laboratories, J.W. Fecker, the old Brashear Co. in Pittsburgh and the venerable Warner and Swasey. If you weren’t wealthy, you had to build it yourself. That’s the world Norman Edmund entered when he got his start selling surplus optics by mail order.

In 1977, when I flew to California to track down and interview former commercial telescope makers, I was under the impression by talking to some people in the industry that Dick Nelson of The Optical Craftsmen was deceased. But Tom Cave in Long Beach told me