Telescope Inventory Hits 40: Including Spectacular New Binoculars
/Our Recent Acquisitions
Our new Oberwerk 105 mm Binoculars, with a pair of Orion 20x80's on top, to compare sizes.
Our Telescope Library has had a great deal of traffic this year, and it is not over yet. Our peak season is summer, naturally, and activity is up over last year. Please note that we already have telescope reservations that go on into the winter, and we serve the membership year round. Recently, we reached something of a milestone: 40 telescope or binocular packages are now available for reservation via the website. The library may continue to grew slightly, but 40 is a good target. As new telescopes are introduced, we will be examining our collection much more critically, and retiring older instruments. Changes now will be toward newer gear, and more diversity.
There are two ways we have increased the number of packages we can offer. One is that we have been acquiring new gear via donation. Between a third and half of all our equipment has been donated in the last 18 to 24 months. Some items that have been here for a while have been unused because they were incomplete. There were missing finder scopes, visual backs, diagonal eyepiece holders, and few people want to borrow an incomplete package, these telescopes or often unusable. By organizing our spare parts collection, many of the "lost" items could once again be matched up, forming packages again. This has helped us to the number 40, even as we retired several older scopes.
What's next? We have a bit of catching up to do, and this winter is a good chance to do it. We are short of storage space, so we are trying to make the best use of what we have. We will deeply at least one collapsible telescope at OMSI, replacing a bulky old Dobsonian. If borrowers tell us that's a good instrument, we may do more of that. We'll have more binoculars at OMSI as well, they pack a lot of observing ability into a small size, and you can expect to see more Refractors, in the 4 to 6 inch class. Again, the emphasis will be on portability and compactness. We will maximize the efficiency of the space we have, and give you more choices.
The Oberwerks ready to spot aircraft, and later, Jupiter!
Outrageous Binocular!
The binoculars in the roller case.
Until recently, we've offered 4 pars of binoculars at OMSI. Now a 5th pair joins the collection, and this one is special. Lots of people have borrowed binoculars without a tripod, and we try to make sure they have one, since you need them for anything over about 12 power.
With these new binoculars, the tripod and mount are part of the package. We are not giving you a choice, because of the size and weight. These binoculars have 4 inch objectives, and it weighs 28 pounds. It has 4 sets of paired eyepieces, and loans out with its own roller case. Each optical system focuses independently, which takes a bit longer, but compensates for differences in vision from one eye to the other. It also has its own finder scope.
These are not the binoculars you grew up with, be prepared for something quite different. Planets and open clusters really come at you with these; you can see a surprising amount of detail detail. With the light gathering ability of a 6" Newtonian, you get great binocular views of the moon, planets, and many open clusters, nebula, and star fields. This is an easy to use instrument, despite its size.
This is just one of our new acquisitions, next month, we'll spotlight another.
by Dr. Katherine Kornei
An unseasonably late snowstorm was pummeling Geneva International Airport when I arrived in early April. I pulled my suitcase through snow, dusted off my knowledge of French from high school, and rode tram #18 to its endpoint, a stop simply labeled “CERN.”
I had traveled over 8,000 kilometers to one of the world’s foremost physics research facilities. The European Council for Nuclear Research—the French translation, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, is the origin of its acronym—was founded in 1954. Perhaps most well known for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the sprawling campus spanning two countries is justifiably famous.
It’s here that beams of subatomic particles zip through the Large Hadron Collider, a subterranean, circular particle accelerator that’s 27 kilometers in circumference (the planet’s largest). But no particles were colliding the day I visited—the Large Hadron Collider is shut down until 2021 for upgrades. As a result, I had the rare opportunity to go deep underground for a close-up view of the accelerator and its instruments.
I donned a bright orange hard hat before entering a large elevator with CERN researchers. After rapidly descending roughly 100 meters below Cessy, France, we walked onto a catwalk painted green. Directly ahead of us loomed the Compact Muon Solenoid, a 14,000-tonne particle detector that’s one of the four instruments that make up the Large Hadron Collider. When beams of particles—most often protons—are forced to collide in the Compact Muon Solenoid, its detectors record evidence of the smash-ups. On the day that I visited, the 15 separate sections of the Compact Muon Solenoid were splayed apart so technicians working on scaffolding could access the kilometers of cables snaking through the detector.
After taking a few pictures, we returned to ground level and blinked in the bright sunlight. I have a newfound appreciation for the enormity of CERN’s instruments and also the human power—physicists, engineers, and programmers—necessary to keep them running.