Posts Made By: Greg Nowell

James DellaPenna said:

Some time ago I bought a C9.25 equipped with the Celestron orange "D" Losmandy style dovetail and had to make a conversion to a Vixen style dovetail to fit my CG-5GT mount. Eventually, I may sell the Losmandy style dovetail. It measures 17.25" in length to accommodate the long body of the 9.25 scope. Does anybody know if this dovetail also fits the C11 bodies? I would like to advertise it as such but first need to know if it's true. Thanks
Jim

You'll have to look here:

http://losmandy.com/secondary.html

Actually your real problem is being clear in the ad which generation of 9.25 it fits. The hole separation (HS) on the old ones is greater (17.25") than it is on the new ones (16.5). It looks like the D9.25N can be swapped with the D11, but the older D9.25 would only be good on older 9.25s.

Someone with a drill press could drill his own holes, so there is that.

Greg N

James DellaPenna said:

Some time ago I bought a C9.25 equipped with the Celestron orange "D" Losmandy style dovetail and had to make a conversion to a Vixen style dovetail to fit my CG-5GT mount. Eventually, I may sell the Losmandy style dovetail. It measures 17.25" in length to accommodate the long body of the 9.25 scope. Does anybody know if this dovetail also fits the C11 bodies? I would like to advertise it as such but first need to know if it's true. Thanks
Jim

The conclusion of this is that I had the GT130 out again (with the diagonal back properly tightened) and everything worked perfectly. A wonderful night. Greg N

The conclusion of this is that I had the GT130 out again (with the diagonal back properly tightened) and everything worked perfectly. A wonderful night. Greg N

There is a limited amount of equipment that comes in from estate sales and auctions, but if you pay attention you'll see that the used market tracks pretty much the new market. For example, you only see every now and then a Criterion reflector, or a Super Polaris equatorial mount. You don't see many NGC Max computers for sale these days.

So, much of the used equipment comes from people who bought new. If you buy a $500 basic scope, for example, and resell it a year later for $250 or $200 even, then you've had the use of a basic scope for a year for a net cost of about $250 to $300 or $20 or so a month, which stacks up well against a movie-a-month at the cinema. So many people buy, try, and sell.

With eyepieces there is a lot of trading up. The 1.25 plossls that come with scopes just circulate around and so do the inexpensive Chinese wide fields. Once you have upgraded to some kind of premium assortment -- say all Delos, or all Pentax -- you're probably not going to be in the eyepiece market much.

People buy refractors and decide that 3 or 4 inches of aperture isn't enough and move on to SCTs and Newotnians. People get into photography and sell their visual equipment. Or they get out of photography and sell a pile of photographic equipment.

What *ultimately* happens to old equipment is hard to say, some of it I'm sure gets broken and tossed out, some of it sits in attics and basements for decades, some of this stuff is actually in use (orange tube c8s from the 1970s) today.

Sometimes you will get the ownership background. Sometimes you won't. With eyepieces in particular they are so standardized that the seller's picture is pretty much all you need to confirm condition. With telescopes....well, you can usually get a history. But when someone says views are razor sharp etc. well....maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. Some people actually don't KNOW that they're not seeing a razor sharp image. One novice thing is to say "I had it up at 100x per inch on the moon! It was terrific!" Well, the news there is the moon looks good in almost any telescope.

Recently I saw someone mention a "clean split" on Castor that "you could drive a truck through." Well guess what, the star has a 5 arc second separation. The only thing that would be remarkable is if the scope DIDN'T split Castor.

You just have to get a sense of what it is you're buying and where the seller is comning from. There are a lot of generic Newts out there. Some are pretty funky. If you asked me about mine yes I could tell you from top to bottom what each part was. I could tell you how I customized my C14. Someone selling an 8 inch Chinese dobt that he never got around to using might be considerably more vague.

As a general rule on Astromart people know what they're doing and that's good and bad. It's good because when you see those guys who have several dozen sales you are likely to get very candid appraisals of the gear. It's bad because unlike Craig's list there are no real steals because people know what they're doing. Or the real steals are in stuff that no one really wants.

One thing not to forget is the "wanted" ad as opposed to the "for sale" ad. If you're just starting out and put up an ad saying you're trying to put together a starter eyepiece kit you'll probably get some helpful answers from people who have extra plossls lying around and would let them go cheap to help you get started.

The same goes for your "serious scope." A 6 or 8" Chinese Newtonian is a serious instrument that will show a great deal, but to people who are paying $8,000 for a Takahashi 5" refractor it's not a "serious scope." It's an entry-level scope. Here too if you put up a wanted ad saying "newbie seeking starter scope at good price" you'll probably get some help. Putting together five or six plossl eyepieces at that sell for $40 to $80 new might seem like a big deal and "serious" to you in comparison to buying a department store scope, but it's entry level stuff to someone who has $4k for a wide selection of XW or Nagler eyepieces.

In any case one of the things I detect in your post is the idea that the people with dozens of sales might not be as trustworthy as someone with very few sales. This is a bit ironic because the people who've amassed the greatest amount of stuff tend to be the ones who will often sell entry level items cheap: to get rid of them, and because getting $20 vs. $30 on a $40 eyepiece begins to seem less important when you've shucked out for a $12,000 mount.

Phillip Jones said:

Looks great! More modern, improved navigation. Most importantly, the ads allow photos to be enlarged for viewing.

I went to the new site and didn't see any ads. Would be nice if there were a few dummy ads. I don't really hate anything about astromart. I do wish that the forums were more active. Greg N

The problem with the solution of charging more than is already charged (and solicited in terms of donations) is that it does have the effect of turning people to other places.

"A very interesting thread" on Cloudy Nights will get anywhere from 500 to 1500 views. A very interesting thread on the forums here gets about 1/10th that. Part of this story is that a lot of folks just kick up a fuss at paying a fee for web site access.

It doesn't have anything to do with Herb's personality. The New York Times tried charging for news and got its butt kicked. The Wall Street Journal is able to charge, though.

To my mind, the Astromart forum boasts some of the most knowledgeable people around, so I'm not saying it isn't worth some money. The question is trying to predict the effect on the total market size.

Charging $1 or $2 an ad also strikes me as a good way to go but again the problem is how much of the market will be drawn off by that.

Many of us old timers know EXACTLY what Herb means when he says he keeps this place clean. I remember when there was a hole bunch of Asian-based fraud, shortly before Herb took over. And I think it is worth paying for a "clean market" which is why I buy packs of ads for $10.00.

But how many potential buyers for advertisers would one lose with higher fees?

We don't know.

The other side of this is that Herb is basically running one of the major Astronomy ventures in the U.S. and the world, a position of "imperial prominence" which only the three magazines and CN share. It is a prestigious and highly prominent role, IMHO. If one looks at the Yahoo groups, they are basically tribal outposts and territories by comparison. When Herb gets agitated by something going on in the tribal territories, he tends to venture out of his dominion and into these places in much the same way that the Ottoman Empire used to launch punitive expeditions into the Arabian peninsula.

The Arabian peninsula remained a wild and undomesticated place, notwithstanding.

So I wish our fearless leader (Herb) would worry a bit less about the tribal regions. As it happens, the most recent tribal revolt occurred in my territory, the ordinarily sleepy C14 group with 800 members. I had been away for 2 days when the anti-astromart thing broke out (a thread that had gone nowhere suddenly came alive). I/we had already extinguished a similar outbreak on Losmandy (from the same malcontent). The truth of the matter is that I would have taken care of matters on C14 as well, in my way, as we did on Losmandy.

In other words Herb has cultivated a fair number of loyalists who are managing things out there (in our own ways) in the tribal territories, and if he leaves these local issues to us the Astromart Empire would not suffer for it. Because, although it is true that an occasional revolt breaks out in the tribal zone, and Herb gets word of it, what he doesn't see is the dozens of times people say "You should join astromart and look for that used, you'll earn back your $12 on your first one or two purchases." We do that all the time. These positive referrals are sewn throughout the posts any time eyepieces and other equipment comes up. They don't always appear in threads wehre someone has a beef.

The strength of Astromart lies in the hundreds of positive referrals we give the place, not in our ability to squash the occasional malcontent.

Greg N

I see that a lot is going on here with an upgrade and new look etc.  I also see that several articles I wrote some years ago, to which I still refer people, have disappeared from the site.  One was a review of Losmandy Ovision, another was how to collimate an SCT in "adverse circumstances."

Just would like to know if those articles are going back up.

Thanks,
Greg N

Thank you for that.  What is confusing about this new state of affairs is that the articles have disappeared from Google searches.  

Are they going to stay disappeared?   Usually when I refer someone to these articles I just Google them and paste the link.  Logging on here and retrieving them will take considerably longer. 

Thanks Greg 

Originally Posted by Donald Marriott

Hi Greg, thanks for posting your concern. Google is in the process currently of reindexing all of the old links to the site. I'm hoping that it will only be a day or two to restore this fully. Do you happen to know the previous "search terms" you were looking for to find the articles. I'll personally keep an eye on those and make sure they get reindexed for you.

Thank you

Well it's nice to know you know what's going on.  I suggest we give it a week or ten days.  Google is pretty thorough.  It indexed all this stuff once before.

thanks,
Greg N

High Vladimir I'm not sure what happened to the original thread but you did manage to bring up some of my articles--thanks for that. 

This one, however, needs to have its pictures restored.  Only one picture loads, at the bottom, and really the substance of the article is a whole series of pictures.  

I am hopeful that they can be recovered.  Here's the link

https://www.astromart.com/reviews/telescopes/show/shipping-scts-and-refractors

Thanks,

Greg N