Postby The Dirt » Thu Sep 27, 2007 7:05 pm
Andre, please find the video. HAS to be a video. PLEASE let there be a video.
ANG, sweet! I had a 4-inch reflector, which was basically just a toy. When in school, I used to bring it to 'star-partys' of the school's astronomy club. They had a Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain, but the thing about it that was cool was that once he had it set-up and dialed-in, he would look up the coordinates of something he wanted to see, punch it in the mount's computer, it would hum and slew around, and by God there it was dead-center in the field-of-view. That was the first time I saw Neptune.
I bought a kit and started grinding my own 8-inch mirror, and had it pretty well hogged-out, but never un-packed it again after I moved in the middle of the project. I still have it and all the abrasives in a box in my garage. What I really wanted to do was buy a finished 12-inch mirror, and make my own equatorial. A guy from Oklahoma had made a neat compact wooden yoke-type equatorial that could break-down for transporting, and I had corresponded with him, and still have the plans.
What the hell intervened? I don't know. Marriage, kids, bills, beat's me.
But it was nice, on a dark evening, to be able to look out there so far and realize how small we are.
It's surprising how many people only see the night sky in two dimensions, and who have no comprehension of even solar system mechanics. There was a recent internet hoax about Mars' closest approach to Earth, that it would look as big as the full moon. I had to chuckle.
