 |
Sometimes, you get what you pay forSaturday, May 16, 2:30pmMom had seen some 'interesting' yard sales listed in yesterday's paper, and since the one that had CDs, books and videos sounded interesting, I said I'd go with her. That was the first sale we hit, around 7:45 this morning. The videos were home-recorded movies, mostly stuff off the Disney Channel, I think. The music was bluegrass and jazz -- not really appealing to me -- and the books were romance novels (ugh!) and John Grisham, et al. Nothing that caught my eye. Except the telescope I noticed just as we were leaving. No box, no manuals, no finder scope in its holder, just the telescope and tripod. Nine bucks... I've wanted a telescope since the summer I was 14, when my uncle took my cousin and I to the county fair in Burlington, Iowa. Someone had set up their very nice telescope, and focused it on one of the planets (I think it was Saturn, but I don't remember now for sure), and was letting people take a free peek at the heavens. That summer, between seeing all the stars that I'd always missed because of city glow back home in California, and seeing whatever planet it was I saw (I remember the guy asking if I saw the moons, and so that makes me think it wasn't Saturn. But then, for all I know, Saturn probably has moons in addition to rings *shrug*), I decided I really liked astronomy. But the closest I'd ever come in California was daytime field trips to Griffith Observatory, just looking around. We never even went into the planetarium. Besides that, living in the Los Angeles suburbs, even if I'd had a telescope, I probably wouldn't have seen much for all the ambient light. Still, the dream of getting into astronomy never entirely faded. I had thought of taking a class at the community college, but as I didn't drive, and Mom isn't comfortable driving at night, I never did. Needless to say, I let my dreams run away with me, and I paid the nice lady $9 and carried off the telescope. When Mom picked it up, it rattled, and that should have been my first clue. *chuckle* Half a dozen yard sales, and two hours later, after the moon was no longer visible in the sky, we finally got home. I got my new telescope out of the trunk, took it out to the backyard, and set it up. I'd looked through it at the yard sale, but the image was blurry, and I couldn't get the adjustment knob to do anything but spin. I proceeded to take the scope apart, clean it up, and fix the teeth that the adjustment wheel's cog turned against, and got everything working nicely. Except I wasn't 100% sure I remembered which way the lenses went in. I'd marked them, but that was after I'd left the room to get a fine marker, and I may have misremembered which way they went. Anyway, I got everything back together, took it back out and set it up again... blurry, no matter how far I adjusted the eyepiece. There is no lens in the eyepiece itself, just a pair of lenses at the far end, but it doesn't look like there ever was anything in the eyepiece to begin with. I took the lenses out again (the frontmost one was filthy and that was why I'd taken them out in the first place), tried every combination possible, and still couldn't get a clear image, either at arm's length, or back in the scope itself. Looking at things very close, it's not blurry, but anything beyond about 3 feet and it starts to go fuzzy. Maybe it's just part of it being a refracting telescope (no mirrors that I could see, so it must be), maybe I'm not looking at things far enough away -- I'll try looking at something heavenly after the sun goes down -- or maybe, as was to be expected, I got what I paid for. A decent tripod, a metal and plastic tube, and a couple pieces of glass. At any rate, it was sufficent for an afternoon's diversion. Jev's not online, and it's another nice, sunny day, not too hot, so I'm off to stitch my dragon. || Home | Journal Index ||
 
|
![[ Open Pages ]](oplogo.gif){kind=small}