Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Mr. Yoshida's telescope ranking

Here's the site in Japanese. Over at CloudyNights.com is a translation and some observations in this thread.

Between my astro-buddies and myself, we have quite a few of the scopes listed in his rankings. We also have scopes that are not listed. I wish we could fly Mr. Yoshida to Texas so he could look through what's missing from his list. I would love to learn what criteria he uses and what steps he follows to determine the rankings.

I'm betting that the larger aperture TEC scopes would land pretty high up on the list. I've had the privilege of looking through the TEC160FL, TEC180FL, and TEC200FL. Personally, I would love to own any of those, or even the ED version of the 160 and/or the 200 (sadly, the 200ED is no longer made). I would also like to see more BORG scopes on his list.

Friday, December 19, 2008

APOD - Dec 9, 2008

Having neglected the blog for a while, I decided to revive it with my lucky day. One of my recent images was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on December 9. I am deeply honored. Below is the image as formatted by the APOD editors:



Details can be viewed here on my website (VisualUniverse.org).