 Here is Melanie with my vintage, circa 1967
Sears
"Discoverer" Model 4 6305A 60 mm Equatorial Refractor Telescope
(focal length 900 mm, f15 optics). Purchased on eBay for a very reasonable
price, it was in excellent condition optically and physically. There are a few minor
paint scratches that I plan to repair. After disassembling all the mechanical parts,
cleaning, greasing, and reassembling them, operation is very smooth. The sun projection
screen will come in handy for the April 2024 total solar eclipse, and incredibly
enough my house in Erie, Pennsylvania sits almost dead center in the path of totality.
The shipping / carrying case came with the telescope. It is constructed with a mahogany
plywood top and bottom surface and with solid mahogany frame pieces. All the hardware
was removed and either polished or painted. The wood was sanded just enough to get
it smooth and remove a couple very minor scratches. I was careful to not erase any
of the original already faded ink stamping on the inside bottom; it has "JAS," with
the rest being Japanese. Then, three coats of semigloss polyurethane ...
 It was while I was in the USAF at Robing AFB,
Georgia, that my interest in astronomy was rekindled and I decided to move from
a cheap 2" Tasco refractor to a 'real' telescope that had more light collecting
capacity and was on an equatorial mount with a sidereal drive system. My Air Force
pay did not allow for anything as nice as a Celestron or Meade model, but an advertisement
in Astronomy magazine by Criterion Manufacturing made the goal seem obtainable in
the RV-6 'Dynascope.' For a mere $279.95, I could purchase a 6", f-8 Newtonian telescope
with a pillar-type tripod mount and an equatorial drive. I immediately wrote a check
and mailed it off to the company's location in Connecticut. Then, I waited... and
waited... and waited, but no telescope arrived after more than
...
 There
are some really excellent pieces of software available to
amateur astronomers ranging
in function from presenting the night sky in incredible detail and can even control
your telescope (TheSkyX) to image processing (RegiStax). Screen shots and hyperlinks
are given below. RegiStax is free to anyone, but to get TheSkyX free, you have to
buy a Celestron telescope that bundles it with the hardware
(as low as $80 for the
PowerSeeker 70AZ). Stellarium is a totally free, open source sky chart
program. It appears to do everything TheSkyX does, including
…
 This is über-cool. A bunch of guys created
a true scale model of the solar system
in the Black Rock desert of Nevada. They used to-scale sun and planet diameters
and traced out to-scale orbital paths in the sand. Earth was a blue marble and the
sun was about a meter and a half in diameter. Posts driven into the ground at orbit
distances had planet models mounted atop them. The accompanying video is very well
done, and the slickest part is where their cars were driven around the orbital paths
at night with headlights on. I was disappointed, though, that Pluto was left out
just because a bunch of pointy-headed scientists demoted it to a 'dwarf planet'
...
 "NASA's Pluto experts have revealed new high
resolution close up images of the surface of Pluto - and admit they are stunned
by the planet. They reveal a 'bewildering variety of surface features' that have
scientists reeling because of their range and complexity. 'If an artist had painted
this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but
that's what is actually there,' said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan
Stern, of the SwRI, Boulder
..."
 "The National
Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Green Bank, West, Virginia, has asked that
hams notify the facility if they plan to operate within 10 miles of either the Green
Bank Telescope (GBT) or the Sugar Grove Research Station in Sugar Grove, West Virginia.
The internationally renowned scientific research facilities
..."
 "Purdue University scientists announced the
discovery of a previously unknown crater on the surface of the moon. The crater,
temporarily named after aviator Amelia Earhart, was discovered using data provided
by NASA's GRAIL mission. The team of researchers behind this find say that the crater
appears to measure about 124 miles
..."
 "NASA tests the 'Ferrari of rocket engines'
for mission to Mars - CNET If we're going to get humans to Mars, we're going to
need a bigger rocket with a much more powerful engine. This is the RS-25, the engine
designed for NASA's Space Launch System rocket, intended to launch the Orion spacecraft
and, eventually, see humanity on its way to Mars: the
..."
 Super-low-noise-figure
receivers are absolutely essential in
radio astronomy work. The need has driven major advances in the state of the
art of cryogenically cooled front ends with noise temperatures near absolute zero.
Antenna technology has also benefitted from radio astronomy due to the need for
precision steering and narrow beam widths. Phased arrays for interstellar targets
requires that element spacing being large enough to require separate antennas as
the elements, which creates a very large effective aperture, hence greater angular
resolution. Networks located continents apart are synchronized with the use of atomic
clocks to allow signal time of arrival and therefore phase to be accurately measured.
This story gives some of the early efforts.
 "Jupiter's
moons are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the
earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist." -
Francisco Sizzi (Prof. of Astronomy), dismissing Galileo's sighting of the
moons. Now there is a prime example of reductio ad absurdum absurdity.
•
Sears
"Discoverer" Model 4 6305A 60 mm Equatorial Refactor Telescope
• My Early Amateur Astronomy Days
• My Dynascope RV-8 Newtonian
Telescope
• Celestron
CPC Deluxe 800 HD Telescope
• My Celestron NexStar 8SE Telescope
• Celestron
NexStar 8SE Telescope Teardown Report
• Astronomy Articles from
Vintage Magazines
• Celestron NexImage
Camera Teardown
•
Installing the Feathertouch SCT MicroFocuser
•
JMI
MotoFocus for the NexStar 8SE Telescope
• Criterion
RV-6 'Dynascope' Telescope Advertisement
• Tamaya NC-2
Astro-Navigation Calculator
• Find Your Birth Star
• Jupiter and Venus Photos
•
Neil Armstrong Commemorative Moon Photo
• Venus / Pleiades
Conjunction of 2012
• Moon Craters - Registax Enhanced
• Full Super Moon of 2013
• Sunspot Photos
• Comet Holmes Photo
• Video of
Wind Turbine on Barracks Beach
• Total Lunar
Eclipse of February 20-21, 2008
•
Telescope & Sky's Official Observatory Construction
• Telescope and
Sky - Website of the Stars
• Free Amateur Astronomy Software
• Amateur Astronomy News Archive
#3
• Amateur Astronomy News Archive
#2
• Amateur Astronomy News Archive
#1
 National
defense needs have pushed back the frontiers of science and technology since time
immemorial. Mechanics, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, psychology, astronomy,
electricity, and as of the late nineteenth century, electronics. Astronomy was useful
as a navigational tool and required a very sophisticated knowledge of geometry and
algebra to make it accessible to seafaring men, cartographers, and land surveyors.
Since the early 1900s,
radio astronomy has played a huge role in the advancement of super-sensitive
receiver designs. Most people think of information arriving to them in two or maybe
three forms: sound, visible light, and some (but not many)
even consider radio waves. As over-the-air AM and FM radio broadcasts die out, even
fewer people are aware of radio
…
 You have probably seen the news about asteroid
"QE2" (1.5
miles wide, like the one which eradicated the dinosaurs) that will pass within 3.6
million miles of the Earth on May 31. That might seem like far, but it is only 15x
the distance between Earth and the moon. Anyway, this
Frank and Ernest
comic strip appeared on May 13th and I cut it out to remind me to post it today,
on the eve of QE2. QE2, BTW, is a nerd pun on the potential destruction to Earth
that the government's Quantitative Easing policy might cause.
 A controversy brews over
the merits of breeding plants that glow like a lightning bug. Proponents say
glowing trees could eventually replace electric street lights, thereby reducing
pollution created by generating stations. Opponents say messing around with tree
genes is dangerous and should be disallowed since it could lead to unanticipated
environmental ramifications on both plant and animal species. The unique aspect
of this effort is that it is being pursued primarily by genetic hobbyists rather
than corporations - at least for now. There is bound to be a huge financial potential
for such a copyrighted line of plants. My opposition to the concept is primarily
a concern for light pollution projected skyward. Astronomers have a difficult enough
time with ever-encroaching sources of ambient light, but a planet overrun by cross-bred
and mutated glowing plants (and possibly animals), especially if they are capable
of emitting levels high enough to replace street lights, would effectively blind
billions of dollars of investments in telescopes
...
 QST is
the official publication of the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL), the world's
oldest and largest organization for Ham radio enthusiasts. Many amateur radio operators
also have an interest in astronomy and as such, occasionally articles appear covering
topics on amateur radio
astronomy. There are also quite a few articles dealing indirectly with aspects
of astronomy such as Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communications where signals are bounced
off the moon's surface in order to facilitate transmission (although it is really
more of a hobby achievement). The October 2012 edition of QST had an article entitled, "Those
Mysterious Signals*," which discusses galactic noise in the 10-meter band.
Arch Doty (W7ACD) writes about the low-level background noise that is persistent
in the high frequency (HF) bands. At HF, Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A are major sources
of cosmic noise, for example. Low level signals come from pulsars...
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