Re: ATMJ Help, again

[David McCarter <mccarterd@claven.fanshawec.on.ca>]

>So, what innovations have you spotted over the last few years that were used
>by a telescope maker in your astronomy club years earlier?

When I consider the scopes available from Meade, Celestron, and Coulter, I
think of the very old designs of refractors, the twenty plus year old
design of the SCT which does not seem to have changed much except for the
electronics, and the equatorial mounted cardboard tube. No innovations
here. Even the dobsonian scopes these manufacturers make are based upon old
designs, very similar to units you can see in the early ATM issues. The
elevation bearings are small, the bearing surfaces are everything but
teflon on ebony black star.

As this month's issue of Sky News (a Canadian publication edited by Terry
Dickenson) reports in the review of the ETX, it's just a plastic copy of
the Questar, and more affordable too. BTW, mine _is_ defraction limited and
shows perfectly straight ronchi lines.

Innovation in commercial scopes? Not yet from the big manufacturers.

Dave