mike a feist wrote:
I am still thinking about it Cliff.
The business of "soon losing interest" ,Skyhawk, as you say, may indeed be made worse by your Asperger's etc, however is not confined to those with that problem. After many years of general observing, one can soon lose interest, hence the need to focus on a small part of the subject and even George Hole of the big Patcham telescope is reported that in later years preferred his pipe and slippers in front of the fire, saying that there was nothing left to observer!
You do seem to have amassed a lot of expensive equipment and wonder just what you originally planned to observe. Actually ten minutes focussed on a special interest subject, currently in my case comets, asteroids, conjunctions of planets etc is quite long enough to make an observation if one's equipment is easy to set up and use.
I really do have a low level of concentration when it comes to listening to talks, and nearly always now fall asleep and cannot wait for them to end especially if they are tooooooo long. I much preferred to give them although what with my rather knackered voice - too much talking, and partial deafness - getting old, plus probably the change in technicalities of presentation, I rather balk even at that.
Regards maf
I prefer to go out with people, to me being alone with a scope is boring, which in my case sounds really stupid as I HATE being around people (aspergers does that), but it is nice to be able to say "HELP !!!!!" sometimes AND help others which is what I really like doing.
I retired at 60 two years back and six months before retiring I decided I wanted to get back into astronomy after my good friend Patrick Moore had died, yes we were mates. So I spent six months checking out gear before my NHS pension lump sum came, and got what i did.
For the FIRST time since getting it I used the tube of the HD Edge 8" last night on my AltAz mount
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My sons with Patrick at the stand we ran for and with him, they got 50/50

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