The old tube was removed

I don't know if I put out a post about this. I have to read my own back blog posts. The old telescope tubes were going to be thrown out. I took them home and decided to save them from the scrap heap. I may rework and restore these over time on my own. I may actually rework the mirrors as well, but I think I'd prefer to have them polished and refigured by a professional.

As this would be my personal project, it would cost me some money to do this. It's really not "economically feasible" to do a restore when looking at it from a dollars and cents perspective. If you have "history" with an object, and some history in using it in the past you may have some good memories and feelings about that old object or piece of creation. In the sense that the club built the old blue tube telescope and so many worked on it, it has extra value for me. I was there when it was built. I remember looking through it with other club members. I remember building it. If I was just looking to get an affordable scope I could go out and buy one of many telescopes on the market today that have higher performance and are lighter and frankly look a lot better because they are new. But they are built in China or maybe partially outside this country and partially in California. And they are of course new and have all the bells and whistles. But there is something special you feel when you are looking through a telescope that has history and was built by people here. I know the history, at least part of the history of the blue tube telescope.

The blue tube telescope was spray painted Sky Blue. We called it "sky blue" because it sounded good at that time, back in 1977 and it was a nice sounding name for a color. However the blue we selected was actually "powder blue" when I first described the color I was pushing for when I was the Astronomy Club president. I wanted "powder blue" because that matched the color of my father's Powder blue 1975 Newport Custom. That old Newport Custom was a huge car and had a great ride for cross country road trips. I wanted the telescope to be powder blue, but the terms were quickly changed to "sky blue" which sounds a lot more astronomical.

So when I brought the telescope tube home, I looked at the old tube, it's worn out. It had a lot of grim and dirt on it. Even rust on the straps that were metal and painted that held the tube in the homebuilt telescope yolk mount we made out of wood. The telescope tube looked pretty bad yet. I took out some soap and water and rags and started cleaning it up. I cleaned it up with mostly water and rags. I used sweat equity and mostly just worked on it for a few hours. It was cleaned up pretty well. I left some of the decay on the telescope, to show some of it's age and abuse it had in sitting around all those years. I didn't get rid of all the rust on the straps for example. There are some light rust stains from these on the surface of the tube as well. There's some flaws and separation in the cardboard portion of the tube as well. These look bad, but you don't see them in the dark when you are using the telescope. You won't even notice all the dirt and grim on the the tube that was on it for the most part when it's dark out.

The telescope is still not usable. I removed the tube from the mount. The mirror was removed and sits separately. We checked the mirror out. It's okay, but of course it needs to be repolished and figured. A professional quote for refiguring the mirror from one of the best mirror makers in the country is about $600 maybe more. That's before we even recoat the mirror.

The spider broke a bit when I removed it from the tube. I need to fix the spider and perhaps need to replace the secondary mirror as well. I'd almost be better off with a new spider. I may fix it eventually.

The thing that makes this difficult is from a practical standpoint, this is not actually the best application of dollars for a telescope. I can buy a 10 inch dobsonian telescope for under $500. I can buy a dobsonian Orion telescope and it's less than the cost to fix the mirror. But projects aren't always based on cost.

And a F5 8 inch with a great figure and optics is still a very nice scope to look through. And I'd have the history and know that I'm looking through a telescope that the club built in 1977. There's a special feeling you get when you use a telescope you've built. Maybe it's a bit of pride and something we shouldn't worry about building up to much. I like to think of it as appreciation for all the work that others put into building the earlier instrument.

Fine instruments have this craftsmanship perspective that guys can feel and appreciate. Some items, I'm not going to go into all the kinds of items, but some items have a lot of careful construction and care put into them. A person who has a homebuilt motorcycle or custom motorcycle may feel more appreciation for that than a store bought one. Because it's unique, it has a story and a history. Of course we are not supposed to become overly attached to objects and get to tied up with them. You can check out the extreme example of loving things to much, even junk in a cable show called "Hoarders". "Hoarders" shows people who get so attached to things and so attached to owning things that they end up with a huge collection of junk and decaying items in their house. There house becomes a junkyard and a dumpster. Old folks tend to get into junk collecting and end up holding onto a lot of stuff that has history. Hoarders end up getting a bunch of junk that they haul home and they cannot throw it out because they are to attached to the "value" of the object and "reusing the object" even if it's total garbage. They go to the extreme. You can take reuse to an extreme. They say one man's junk is another mans treasure, but often that second man may be a hoarder. In the old days, I'm talking about a long time ago, people experienced very difficult times and items became scarce. This happened in the Great Depression and during some of the sacrificial years of WWII when items were hard to find. Some in some cities that were under siege in war, or who experienced major economic problems, saw the value in "items" and reusing them or saving them. Because when dollars or currency becomes worthless, then the only value left is in the actual items and bartering may happen. So some people get into this collecting mentality and it actually works at times of extreme need. The problem is some get old, or become mentally unstable and put to much attachment into the value of things and they don't have time or can't muster the energy to mentally reject things and throw them out. They have more that they are collecting than they are throwing away. Older folks buy items and pay a lot for them as well and over time the items become worthless, at least many of these items will. And these things are useless, but they will see the item as if it was new, and remember all the money they spent on it. They may just have "depression" mentality and think that they are getting ready for the next depression. Or they may be kind of an odd junk collector of sorts. So they will start to hoard junk items.

Older folks get into this. And older families can get into this habit. How do you break free? You have to decide to go through the things you own and look at the real practical value of these things. Can they be easily replaced? Have you used this and can you really use this? Will you use it, or is it just some useless memory item. Some old items, like old magazines for example have little value but people will keep them even if they are largely worthless. The collector will always have some excuse. If they are a hoarder, they will find or have a complex set of beliefs that puts a lot of value on the junk. They become emotionally attached to it. I'm not talking about a family heirloom, I'm talking about crap you may even pick up out of a dumpster, someone else may have some low quality crap they throw out, and it's worthless. And you'll pick it up, figure it can be fixed, when it can't and haul it home and add it to your heap. Old folks get into this more than younger ones.

Kids may have this tendency to, but usually with toys. They have to have more and more and soon they have a room full of junk. A healthy parent and child may end up having some kind of criteria or formula to give the older toys away to keep the clutter down. The value isn't in the item, it's being able to use something or not use it. And also there may be more value in giving something to someone who has nothing, than keeping it and hoarding it for yourself.

Some popular materialistic sayings are really based on a hoarding mentality as well. Think about it? He who dies with the most toys wins. . . ? What does he win? Toys don't really make winners. But we think this in a our modern life. Greed can at times end up creating things like the feeling that we can expand and produce nothing, we can profit and everyone can get richer and richer. We did this to some extent in the past 20 or 30 years with the boom years and credit bubble. We thought we could buy more and more and our jobs would pay more and more and the middle class would move to China and we'd all be rich and we'd make money off China's emerging class in a world economy. It didn't happen. What happened, was raw materials and fuel prices increased. We moved production offshore to other countries and we couldn't produce anymore. We created false economies built on ever increasing leveraged growth, that couldn't be maintained. We hit a resource and possibly a "conspiracy" limit. It's difficult to say what all the causes were. But everyone wanted to haul home a boatload of toys from big box stores and fill up huge new houses with them that had large mortgages. Then the markets started to fall. On the downside, and as the economic crisis came apart, all that need for new toys and big houses, didn't solve any problems. Some of course lost their houses and all their junk from China was thrown on the lawn. This is the end result in hoarding and greed. The final result of "he who dies with the most toys wins". Things are not as important as people, but we don't hear that very much in America. It's used as a slogan to fund raise, but not much else. Well I've strayed off into values and greed discussions instead of astronomy, so it's time to get back to the column.

I'm hoping I'm not showing hoarding tendencies toward old telescope junk. Maybe that's a weakness of astronomers.