[rrussell1962]

Hi Geoff, the picture you put up from Cloudy Nights is my Vixen sitting by the pool waiting for dark! I posted the photo on Cloudy Nights in a couple of threads to do with Vixen scopes etc. There is an interesting thread somewhere on Cloudy Nights with somebody in, I think Portugal, who was restoring one.

Hi Ken, Not absolutely certain on the period when those ED80S's were available. I am pretty sure my catalogue is from 2000 - It shows the Skysensor 2000PC as being an option and I picked up the catalogue from Bintel in York Street early in 2000 before leaving Sydney in March of that year. I bought mine from somebody that had originally purchased it in Japan and interestingly it was supplied there with 0.965" fittings - a prism diagonal, a 25mm Vixen Kellner and 2 Vixen Orthoscopics. From memory, please correct me if I am wrong, Vixen started to become fairly well known and more widely available in the early 1990's - that was when I saw a GP102M in the UK, maybe in Broadhurst Clarkson, and couldn't resist. Bintel were a Vixen dealer in the late 1990's as was Astro Optical in Crows Nest. In fact I am fairly sure that Bintel stocked Vixen when they were in the Hunter Arcade in the mid 1990's.