old guy wrote:
have been to many star parties but am getting away from them. too many people for my liking's.
I know what you mean. I was a member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society from ’76 to ’85 (longer, really, but I stopped going to the meetings and SPs). My star-party pad neighbor was Steve Kufeld (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Kufeld) inventor of the Telrad finder scope. He had 11x80 binos mounted on a parallelogram mount with his Telrad on it. People would line up to look through his binos and check out the Telrad. He’d come over to my pad and, sitting in one of our beach chairs, use my 7x50s. BTW, beach chairs are good because they are small and easily portable and you can rock them back to get a good sky view. Not so much fun when they break, though. ;)
LS
