I bought a cheap kids-style 60mm telescopes in the early 1970s. It boasted up to 400x maginification with it's barlow lens & other cheap eyepieces, but at that high a magnification with only a 60mm lens it would be a very dim blurry image, & very unsteady even on it's tripod. It was a long-tube design too, so was a very narrow field of view. Still, I was able to get a pretty fair view of Saturn, it's rings, & moons. I was able to see Jupiter & it's moons, but only just barely make out Jupiter's cloud lines & spot on a good day.
At about 150-200x it gave excellent views of the big bright moon, craters, & mountains to the point it almost looked like you were there flying above it. I picked up a Bushnell 10x50 binoculars about the same year from K-mart for around $40. I didn't read or hear about any binocular astronomy back then. I just thought it would be a good idea to point it into the sky one night. Boy was I surprised on how it brightened & sharpened up the views of the sky in the city. And the colors were so much more vivid.
My first trip to dark country skies with them, I was totally dazzeled at the view. It was like looking out a window of a space ship right out there... especially with the wide angle of view offered by most 7x to 10x binoculars. Those binoculars & the scope were lost in the fire.
Our first scope as a kid was a POS. It was one of those small hand-held collapsable scopes with only a 20mm objective lens. Pointing it at the sky gave a dim, blurry, & distorted view. It had a very narrow field of view. It was like looking down a very narrow long pipe, so it was almost usless for looking at landscapes too.
As a kid I built my own scope using an old very wide rectagular magnifying glass & an old movie projector lens as the eyepiece. It probably was only 10-12x, but boasted an extremely wide field of view, & brightened up the night sky a lot with a 4"x3" lens in the front. It wasn't quality optics, so stuff wasn't very sharp, & had an edge of rainbow color around the stars & planets. But it beat that crappy 20mm scope at 50x.
I begged my parents for even a basic beginners astronomy scope but never got one. I don't think I ever got anything I asked for on Christmas or my birthday... and I wasn't asking for expensive stuff either. I think they just went to the store & picked up whatever POS that was on sale for the kids that the store sales people were pushing hard.
They lied to me too. I was told a scope for astronomy would cost thousands of dollars. As soon as I was able to afford one on my own, I was able to get a fair beginners scope & excellent binoculars for under $100 for both at K-mart.
My first use of binoculars happened when I used a roommate's 7x35 binoculars that used to belong to his father. They had pretty good optics. They gave excellent daytime views of the landscape, nature, & birds. But at night those 35mm lenses only brightened up the sky a little bit. Although better than naked eye views or the sky, it was no big deal. I had no idea that moving up to 50mm binoculars would make such a spectacular difference until I got them. I bought the 50mm ones because I liked my roommates ones for hiking & camping, so wanted my own. I didn't intend on using them for astronomy, until I discovered the vast improvement in the sky views with 50mm lenses.
Topic: Pluto, space, & beyond. (Read 48204 times)
