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Re: telescopes



To whom ever,
I am glad you included an estimage of the money your looking at. You
give no indication of where in the world your located, but that will not
stop me from a few sugestions. Besides a rest room a slab outside to set up
visiting telescopes on with power connections, a "warm room" insulated from
the room with your telescope, at the minimum a storage room the keep computers
and sleep those too tired to drive home, at best large enought to show slides
and give a public lecture. A 5 kw generator should be more then enough. I
worked in one university observatory that had 500 watts of available power
to turn the heater on you turned everything else off.
For telescopes look to Meade or Celestron for excellent amateur class
instruments - see Sky & Telescope or Astronomy magazines for advertisements.
I am currently using a LX-200 and love it as a teaching and public viewing
tool. It has a built in microcomputer and you can simple slect the object you
want to look at and the telescope moves to its location. Without this kind of
control I spent about have my time in the evening finding objects in the
telescope, now I can go from one to the next in a few minutes. It is also
capable of doing CCD imaging which allows my students to take their own
pictures that are comparable to professional ones, and the resluts are
almost immediate, unlike taking traditional pictures that require developing the
film.


I hope this helps.
Gary Karshner
karshner@stmarytx.edu