Admin's Note - this article was written by Pete Kellerman Well another Christmas has come and gone and this year it was a little disappointing. Not because of what I got, but what was available out there for this season. One of the things I like about Christmas is all the department stores stock up with telescopes. Although they are generally the cheap scopes, they are still a pretty good gage of what each one of the manufacturers has to offer in the small telescope market. Generally their better scopes are the same scopes with better eyepieces. In the last few years it has been fun to see how each company tries to out do the other with the latest high tech scope. This year no one introduced anything new. Some scopes were the same old thing repackaged.

Admin's Note: This article was written by Karl Krasley, President of CAS. Many years ago when I started this wonderful world of observational astronomy, the refractor was “King” of the amateur telescope world. I can still remember as a kid looking at those old catalogs and seeing a picture of a guy standing next to a very large and long refractor. I would tell my parents that this was a telescope that I would love to own. They of course told me to look for something a little bit smaller (and little bit less expensive).