January 28, 2012

Remembering the Beginning

image by Ralph Pass and Edmund ad from MacPurity (Thx!)

I noticed in the Sky & Telescope Weekly Bulletin that Norman Edmund has died. If you are old enough to have been interested in astronomy before the days of Meade and Celestron you will fondly remember the Edmund Scientific Company advertisements and catalogs that were the dreambooks for amateur astronomers. When I was 13 years old I saved my earnings from summer jobs and bought a $29.95 Edmund Space Conqueror 3" reflector like this one. It was amazing to move up from my 7 power spyglass (that had offered wonderful views of the Pleiades) to detailed views of the lunar surface, detection of the rings of Saturn and faint bands on Jupiter. With no Hubble telescope images for comparison my eyepiece views were exciting, and the tagline, A telescope is your key to the universe, worked for me. I later moved on and ground, polished and silvered a 5" mirror and built a wood tube to hold it and a pipe fitting to mount it. The 5" really introduced me to the Moon and led me, by way of other small telescopes and spacecraft images to LPOD. Thank you Norman Edmund for helping me get started.

Chuck Wood

Technical Details
2011-08-13T03:09. Apogee U9 + Meade LX200 12"F/10 + a Hydrogen Alpha Filter. Two frame mosaic, each image was a 0.3 second exposure.

Related Links
Edmund Optics obituary for founder

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