Sunday, March 20, 2016

Here is a photo I took of myself looking up at Saturn back around 2009 or so.  I'm looking through a telescope called Big Bertha, by it's former owner.  This telescope was built back in 1962 and is the same age as the old black tube 12.5 inch telescope that used to be used inside the observatory.  This telescope has a 10 inch mirror so it offers a view that is not as bright as the former telescope in the observatory.  This is a wider field of view however than the old telescope.  It has a F5.35 focal length which is fairly wide field but offers good planetary views as well.  It is quite heavy with the mount being an old style mount with a lot of weight in the mount and counterweights.  The tube, and mount weight about 200lbs fully assembled.  It offers pretty great views and has a corrector plate much like the SCT inside the observatory, but this is a Schmidt Newtonian.  It's corrector plate cost about $345 when the telescope was built and is a custom optic built by the same company that used to build corrector plates for Celstron.  This corrector plate would cost $1800 to replace (back in 1982), and maybe even much more today (maybe $3000).  The cost to replace the corrector plate in this is more than the entire scope would be valued at.  So it's a fairly rare telescope as it's a one of a kind telescope.  But rare doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable from a market perspective.  This telescope has a lot of history as well.  Harold "the telescope man" who is a member of the club sold this telescope to me.  And he had thousands of people look through this.  One members of the club took his first look through this telescope at the sky many years ago.  Harold showed him Saturn at that time.  This offers great views, but for high powered views of a planet like Saturn, the C14 inside the observatory will offer an even better view.  I still enjoy this telescope.  It's biggest drawback is the time and effort it takes to set this up.  I actually lost one of the slim counterweights that are in this photo and have not replaced that yet.  The mount is a tracking mount, meaning it's motorized and will follow the object, but it's not a GOTO mount.  It won't find the object.  On the back of this telescope is a smaller 60mm refractor.  I'd like to have a better goto mount for this telescope someday, but a nice mount for this sized telescope as it's a heavy telescope would cost me about $3,000 so I haven't bought one yet.

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