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Is your club growing? Shrinking? Here are some thoughts to get you thinking...

The market offers many options for low cost wide fields eyepieces, but they don't deliver sharp performance in the outer 20 to 30% of the field. My thoughts and a proposed solution.

A simple, $15 gear unit can give you a 3:1 focuser reduction drive that will work for any scope.

You might get the impression I’ve become so obsessed with the Meade 7" MAK OTA, that I put too much into it. Yes, I’m really stuck on this one!

The Ultimate Outreach experience....

After more work done on Meade's "BIG MAK" I have revised the counterweight article.

Here's the third article of the three I had planned. Increasing the True Field Of View of the Meade 7" Maksutov.

Meade's big MAK has very few drawbacks. Let's get rid of them!

Have you oiled your telescope today?

do these CCD necessarily have to be competitors?

Yes, Tommy, there is a good 4" short focus achromat.

I have never suffered from a lack of imagination. As a child, I spent many hours dreaming of stories written by Ray Bradbury. I carried books by Clifford Simak and Robert Sheckley to school instead of textbooks. I swore to my parents that I had witnessed first hand the stories described by Isaac Asimov. I considered Stanislav Lem a close relative because my great-grandmother was also from Poland...

"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet."[1] The SKY-MAP.ORG authors completely share these concerns of Stephen Hawking. The only words we could add are that the greatest threat to the human race is the human race itself.

A few specs of dust on your CCD chip can easily be removed with a flat field, but what happens when the dust grains out number the stars? Cleaning your imaging chip doesn't have to be an ordeal with PecPads and Eclipse Cleaning solution.

A perfect 16" mirror? If not, its pretty darn close!