Category Archives: DIY

Do-It-Yourself: done by oneself, as a nonspecialist or person without relevant professional qualifications.

Buying and Selling Astro Gear Online

I’ve had a couple of visitors to my site in the past couple of weeks ask me “What’s the best way to sell my astronomy gear?”  So I thought I’d relay the info I shared with them to you. I hope it’s useful to you.

Times have changed and that’s not necessarily a bad thing!  Gone are the days of placing an ad in the local newspaper, and paying to do so! I guess you can still do that but I don’t know anybody that does these days. We have so many online outlets at our finger tips that can be used to buy and sell not only telescopes and astronomy gear but just about anything else you can imagine.

There are many free online resources and apps where all you need to do is to create an account to post your ads.  Chances are you already have accounts setup on one or more of these outlets and so it’s just a matter of navigating to the place where you create your ad, select a title, add your asking price, input the details of the item or items you are selling, decide on the contact info options and location and add pictures. I’ll dive into more detail about these important selling points in a minute.

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Solar Funnel Project

5″ Meade Newtonian reflector with solar funnel.

Doing star parties over the years I have witnessed long lines of party-goers queued up to take a peak through my telescope. I’ve found this to be the perfect time to talk to folks about what’s being looked at in the telescope. I like to throw out some fun facts and this always spawns more questions and curiosity in the gathered group. Talking to adults and kids about the night sky is one of the greatest aspects of doing star parties.

There is a limit to how many people can look through the scope at any given time, put simply it’s one at a time.  But when I saw this neat gadget called a “solar funnel” I immediately knew it would be great at eclipses to show participants the partial phases and better yet it could do this via projection so many people close by can view the eclipse at once.

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