Let's talk first telescopes.. what was yours?

[Dave221 (David)]

My first scope was an Ascotron 60mm Alt/Az refractor. It was purchased from Astro-Optical Supplies at Crow's Nest. I re-call that it cost $49, quite a sum corrected to today's dollars. My interest in astronomy went back a long time before the scope arrived and I remember looking longingly at Tasco scopes in brochures and shop windows for years before the Ascotron finally arrived for Christmas in 1968.

I was fascinated with the views of the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, double stars and sun-spots (thankfully by projection and not through the supplied dark glass eye-piece filter), great memories. Clearly a small scope could provide heaps of enjoyment for those who already had a real in interest in astronomy.

I went on to buy a Celestron SP-C8 from the same company in 1986 and have been adding scopes and accessories ever since.

Regards,

David.

[DaveR]

My parents gave me an unbranded 60mm scope in 1967(?), which was good but limited. First purchase when I started work in 73 was a 3" f15 Unitron from Astro-Optical supplies. Sold it when I was short of money , but really wish I still had it ;(.

[pgc hunter]

I received a 60mm Tasco refractor as a christmas gift. Even though I was only 10, I remember waking up at something like 3am to view the waning gibbous moon from the sliding door to my backyard... and remember seeing a myriad of craters and mountains. Also had my first view of Saturn through that scope. It was tiny, and a uniform yellowish hue.. but it had rings!

I also recall setting up the scope on my parent's kitchen table early in the morning while every one was asleep to catch a glimpse of Jupiter rising over the neighbour's rooftop. Was very excited to see 2 brown lines across it and dots to either side!

One of my fondest memories was of my dad aiming the scope on Venus and exclaiming in excitement that he can see the surface and craters and everything.... little did he know that it was way out of focus... ofcourse, now we know better!

Unfortunately, the fun was short lived as one of the screws holding the tube to the mount, and the threads for the set screws in the plastic focuser and diagonal became stripped in very, very short order. I remember my parents sending the scope back....waiting something like 2 months for the tube to be returned, and another few weeks for the eyepieces and diagonal.

[clive milne]

5" f5 refractor... ex-NASA moonwatch scope.

http://www.perthobservatory.wa.gov.a.../moonwatch.jpg

[Barrykgerdes]

My first telescope, made in 1951, consisted of a nondiscript spectacle lens with a focal length of about 18" (45cm) carefully attached to one end of a 2" cardboard tube.

At the other end of the tube I built up a sliding tube from cardboard rolled around a lens focal length about 10mm extracted from the view finder of a damaged box brownie.

With this I managed to see the moons of Jupiter. I later added an intermediate lens (main lens from the box brownie) that erected the view so I could use the telescope for normal local viewing. I lost interest after a few days and had no interest in the sky or telescopes until 1990 when I bought a 11TR tasco from the Binocular and telescope shop in Hunter Arcade. With an extra 40mm eyepiece and AC drive I spent $950.

At the time I had a budget that would have got me an 8" Celestron SCT if Mike had worked on me!




Barry

[The Mekon (John Briggs)]

After Barry's post, we shall have to make sure we don't get into a "four yorkshiremen" discussion here!

Mine was pretty modest. 1966 a 40mm table top refractor with sliding draw tube. Fixed eyepiece 30X. Saw Jupiter's 4 moons with this scope, which natually led to a succession of others.

[JB80 (Jarrod)]

I still have and use my first which is the SW 150PL, my wife got it for me when we moved out of an apartment.
I'm looking forward to taking it to clearer skies and getting more out of it than I can now.

[Ric]

My first scope was like a lot of others here. A Tasco 60mm refractor way back in the early 70's. This led to a C8 which I still have and much later to a LX200R 12 which I've had for seven years.

[cosmicap (Peter)]

Our first telescope is a Celestron AstroMaster 130 we bought on a whim from an Australian Geo shop. Have never got the best use out of it: the spotter scope is a red dot in a tube and it just doesn't work for me- can't focus on the dot and a star at the same time, so it's hit and miss for finding anything smaller that the moon! Got a Barlow for it but cannot focus the camera with or without. I guess it's a pretty ordinary scope but we should be able to have more fun than we are having. By the time I've found Saturn everyone has gone to bed! I need guidance! Any advice or help would be appreciated.

[CardiacKevin (Kevin)]

Tasco 50mm refractor when I was about 13. Poor tripod made it so frustrating to use, I was 35 before I got around to getting a Meade LX90 8" which is just as frustrating, but I've become more patient.

[Starless (Brian)]

First scope was an Orion ED80.
Nice instrument let down by mediocre
mount, cheap EPs and diagonal.

[PRejto (Peter)]

My first scope was inspired by a "rich" 14 year old (Los Angeles) friend's Questar. I saved for a long time and bought an 80mm f15 Mayflower refractor on an EQ mount in the mid 60s. The mount was terrible but the lens in the Mayflower was (is!!) terrific. I still have the scope and I always though the views were every bit as good or better than the Questars. Such began my passion for refractors. Whilst in high school I "built" a 5" f15 refractor from a Jaeger lens and put it on a massive Cave Optics "Astrola" mounting. That lens is also quite good and both the scope and mount have followed me around the world from the USA to Australia. After several rebuilds and attempts at upgrades I finally gave in to an unstoppable urge to buy a TEC140 and PMX mount. Sadly the old toys have see little light since that fateful day.Peter

[DavidLJ (David)]

First telescope 1969 – Newtonian :

• 6” mirror, 4 vane spider, diagonal, helical focuser & 3 x 1¼” eyepieces - all bought from an astro shop
• Square section tube made from outgrown playpen struts & plywood
• Mirror cell made from steel hoop mounted on plywood base
• Equatorial head made up from galvanised piping – packed sand used as counterweight
• Stand – 4 vertical wooden struts attached to Tee-section base.

First view : Quarter phase Moon. One glance and hooked forever.

Turned out that the mirror quality was first class and the eyepieces not half bad. Location 2 deg. south of equator. Spent many happy hours getting to know both Northern and Southern Hemisphere skies. Will be the scope that I remember when passing St Peter's gate.

[ozalba (Duncan)]

I have a few parallels with other responders. Growing up in Glasgow, the local firm Charles Frank Ltd was the obvious source of optical delight. I pored over their catalogue as a tiddler for (probably) months, before I was treated to a 40mm/30x Janik refractor on a table-top mount; this was around 1972, I guess. With that little scope, I 'discovered' Saturn, with the tube poking through the skylight; not the best way to observe, but it worked up to a point. I also tracked the movement of Uranus for a few months in 1973 (near Spica, IIRC). I certainly wasn't put off by its small size, and still have that scope today (minus the mount).

Having proved my interest, it was followed by a typical 60mm with all the bits - wooden tripod, couple of eyepieces, Barlow, image erector, solar filter... I both liked and disliked this scope. I liked the extra magnification, slow motion controls, etc, but the mechanical quality of the mount left something to be desired. Still, it did me for another couple of years, I guess, until Dear Old Dad bought one of Charles Frank's own models at auction - a 6-inch reflector on a driven German mount. I have no idea where the 60mm went, but I still have the 6-inch to this day. The drive is kaputt and the whole thing is antiquated (1¼-inch RAS-threaded eyepieces); the Newtonian flat went missing in the move Down Under, so I replaced it 'temporarily' with a piece of front-silvered mirror from an old photocopier ... at least 10 years ago...

Since then I've acquired a Russian Tal-Alkor (65mm Newtonian - brilliant optical quality; diffraction-limited, I'd say) and a junkshop find - the tube from a cheap refractor; I removed the broken rack & pinion focuser and wedged a surplus eyepiece in place to give me about 15x with a 65mm f/10-ish objective. With a ¼-inch BSW nut epoxied into the original mount bracket, it now goes on my photographic tripod for a quick look at the Moon and other large objects (not my bank balance).

So, not put off at all; I was led into a photographic career at the UK Schmidt Telescope Unit and more recently as a presenter at the Brisbane Planetarium. All from a 40mm refractor

[Codoc (Dan)]

15 years ago my son and I attended an astronomy course at the WA Uni and from there we bought an 8" Newtonian on an EQ mount. It wasn't a good buy for a first scope - not the easiest thing to set up and difficult to find my way around the sky.
Recently we bought an 8" LX90 and have had a lot of fun with it. Easy to use, great tutorials on board. My next challenge is to start some photography with my Canon D400.
Dan

[IanW]

The first decent telescope I owned was a Unitron 60mm model 128 that my father picked up for around 225 USD (4 weeks wages) back in 1968. In the early 70s I added a 70mm Amasco from Astro-Optical Supplies in Crows Nest. In 1972 I got a Royal 4.5" EQ Newtonian from Japan and by 1973 I was building my own 8" Newtonian which was mounted on a Fullerscopes MK-III mount and then on a Sampson mount. Both mounts are now long gone but the primary mirror is still in use today.

Since then I've built at least a couple of dozen telescopes and perhaps owned 30 more. My most prized though as a 1.5" short Naval Refractor that my grandfather first showed me the moon and M31 one with in the early 60s. That scope predates 1770.

[Serena]

My first childhood "telescope" was cobbled together with available lenses and it was enough to view the Moon. But this endeavour arose from reading my grandfather's 1920s coffee-table book on the heavens. This spasmodic activity of assembling lenses into telescopes continued into my 20s (always with bad achromatic aberration) until one lunchtime a couple of us in the lab assembled a scope using a good 80mm objective with a microscope eyepiece. This scope was quite popular (except with the guy who used the microscope) and I spent many nights discovering that there was a lot that could be seen. But of course a long tube on a camera tripod is pretty hard to point anywhere specifically, so this became more frustrating than productive. In those times telescopes were quite expensive so with a growing family and intensive career my astro curiosity remained just that, until approaching retirement I found that I would have time and could afford a scope, so bought a Meade 8" LX50. This had insufficient room for cameras to clear the base when pointing at the pole and I upgraded to a 10" Meade SCT optical tube on a G-11 + Gemini. This is now housed in my observatory. Meeting an active astronomer would have got me going much earlier, so this is my message: always take time to show people what there is up there. Mostly they have no idea and there is a lot of reward for giving up a night of "serious" work.

[Wavytone]

My first... A 6" f/8 mirror which I ground and polished, then assembled in an old-school Newtonian OTA circa 1969. Then made a 4.25" f/3 ( that was a sweet RFT, in a handheld shoebox-sized tube you could hold under one arm) and an 8" f/6.7, then a 6" f/18 folded Newtonian which had an f/5 primary and convex secondary

... Eventually I could afford to buy a rather massive equatorial mount from Astro-Optics, but decided to trash the steel pier and made a very solid wooden tripod for it, and a friend made a 10" worm drive for the RA axis though it was never motorised.

Along the way helped to renovate a very fine Cooke 4.5" refractor at school... This was a half-sized version of the Oddie at Mt Stromlo complete with clock drive...

After moving to Sydney swapped the 8" and its mount for an orange C8 (mistake, regretted the C8 but I couldn't manage the big Newtonian where I was living at the time)...

... Then a few years using a 6" f/5 for astrophotographers in the days of film...

Then assembled a 12" Newtonian, Used that for 10 years or so... Bought, used and sold a Meade 8"...


... Dropped out of the hobby 1993 until 2009 and now strictly visual using a 7" Mak on altaz mount...

[Robbos30 (Peter)]

My first scope was a 3inch reflector mass produced white scope with a wobbly metal tripod with 2 eyepieces back in 1982 at the ripe old age of 15. It came with 2 eyepieces : 5mm and 20mm. Altogether everything cost about $100. It was this scope that I stumbled upon M 42 for the first time. Had absolutely no idea what I was looking at and concluded the mirror had muck on it so I took it apart and CLEANED IT. I believe I used soap and turps at the time. Interesting results! Didn't do it a second time and found out it was M 42 but felt like a real goose! I clean the 30 inch mirror a little differently these days.

[GraemeT (Graeme)]

Back in 1955, my Scout group was taken to visit an amateur astronomer in Thornleigh who had built his 12" reflector including mirror. Unfortunately, the cloud curse was in operation and apart from a few moon glimpses, we spent the evening glorying in the newfangled delights of stereophonic recordings.
As I have spent a lifetime working in optics, I made a number of (unsuccessful) attempts at cobbling scopes made from spectacle lenses and impossibly long cardboard tubes.
My first real scope, as I neared my use-by date, was and is an 8" collapsible dob on the advice of the beginners forum sticky by Brian Nolan. This scope has undergone multiple mods and is still my favorite. I have a "mighty ETX105" as a grab-n-go, and am currently joining the ranks of ATM with a travel scope build.
Although they keep the beginners forum ticking over, I do wish more beginners would avail themselves of the accumulated wisdom of that forum before posting "what should I buy?" threads.