Issue 631: The Good Tasco Redux

International Observe the Moon Night with TinyYears ago, in what is still one of my favorite AstroBlog articles, The Good Tasco, I talked about my second Tasco telescope, an 11TE 4.5-inch reflector, which was indeed a good one. The first? Not so much, muchachos. That was a rather execrable 3-inch Newtonian I was given in 1965—it did get me started, though. Anyhow, some thirty five years after the 11TE, another Tasco fell into my hands. Would the third Tasco be the charm or not? Number three arrived in the spring of 2010, and it came to me with my sweet little Orange Tube Celestron C90. The feller I purchased it from, the father of a colleague of Miss Dorothy, was moving to a new retirement situation and was disposing of other stuff, too, some of which he passed on to me. In addition to the Celestron, he threw in a handful of old .965 Japanese Standard eyepieces, an Olympus OM-1 (film) camera, and a 60mm Tasco refractor. What did I do with the Tasco? I set it aside and forgot about it.…