Goodbye to An Old Friend



I have a buyer for my Televue Ranger (the ivory tube model, not the green one), and I will be shipping it off tomorrow or Thursday (depending on when the payment hits my PayPal account). I took it out to the backyard for one final observing session with it. If you don't understand how you can get sentimental over a piece of glass, let me give you analogy you might understand: it's like saying goodbye to my cat, when I moved away to college, and couldn't take my cat, Amboy II, with me. (Amboy? The II? The mother was named after Amboy Crater, a cinder cone in the Mojave Desert we were visiting the day she was born.)



The Ranger doesn't do anything as well as my 5" refractor (except show a little blacker sky around planets), but it is so incredibly sleek and elegant. While it won't show quite as much detail on Saturn or Jupiter, it is still absolutely amazing, considering how small and light it is. It is by far the smallest and lightest real astronomical telescope that I have ever used. I suspect that I will break down one of these days, and buy a larger Televue scope--if only they weren't so expensive!



The Ranger isn't an apochromat, but it is very, very good on color correction. Only on Venus, the Moon, and Jupiter, do you see any color at all, and only on Venus could it be considered a substantial obstacle to seeing detail--if there were any detail to see in Venus's clouds. As an experiment, I used the Baader Fringe Killer filter that I just bought with my 4mm eyepiece in the Ranger. Venus still had a violet haze, but so little that it was not a nuisance. On Jupiter, the Fringe Killer completely wiped out what little violet haze there was.