Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

Well, not really. As astronomically oriented and creative as the Chinese people have always been, it’s not a surprise to learn the telescope was introduced to that country back in the 17th century, not long after it made such a big splash in Europe. By “mother of all Chinese telescopes” I mean amateur telescopes, muchachos.

I don’t mean the Tasco imports that began hitting our shores from Taiwan in the 80s, either, I mean The Little Telescope That Could, the one that showed amateurs “Chinese telescope” was no longer synonymous with “cheap junk.” When this 80-mm refractor burst onto the amateur astronomy scene in the mid 90s, it was the herald of good astronomical things to come from the East. Yep, you called it; I am talking about the ubiquitous Short Tube 80.

Naw, I ain’t talking about observatory domes. I do hope to fulfill my dream in the next few years and have a dome of my own in the backyard, but that is not what is on my mind (such as it is) this morning. I’m thinking about “dome” as in “planetarium dome.” Well, not really a dome, more like the ceiling of Li’l Rod’s boyhood room. Yep, stars on the ceiling.

Just because I promised I’d leave the Pal Junior alone for a while, don’t mean I’ve given up on astro-nostalgia. As I said last time, I think about the good old days of the 60s – 70s frequently of late, as I suppose is natural for someone of my increasingly advanced years to do. OK, OK, alright already! The subject for the day is a forgotten facet of the amateur astronomy (for kids anyhow) of the 1960s, home (toy) planetariums. You know, the Spitz Junior, the Nova, the Sky Zoo, and other alluringly named gadgets that are still fondly remembered by more than a few middle-aged amateur astronomers.

The story of these fascinating gizmos is mostly the story of one man’s, Armand Spitz’s, passion for astronomy, and is an interesting one. If you want a well-written and detailed account, I commend to you Conrad Goeringer’s article, “Stars on My Ceiling” in the July 1992 issue of Sky and Telescope. Course, I do know a few of y’all weren’t even around in 1992, and if’n you were, unlike Unk, not ever’body maintains untidy and dusty stacks of countless old astronomy rags. So here’s the story in a nutshell: Armand Spitz, Director of Education for Philadelphia’s Fels planetarium wasn’t just passionate about astronomy; as you might expect for somebody with a job title like his, he was also passionate about astronomy education. One thing bothered Mr. Spitz, and became ever more a concern as the Space Age dawned in the late 40s and early 50s: most kids hadn’t a prayer of visiting a planetarium. With a Zeiss projector costing hundreds of thousands even way back when, that was no wonder. Outside the big cites few kids (or adults) were able to experience the wonders of the indoor sky.

Spitz set out to change that, and, in 1945, formed his own company, Spitz Labs, to do so. By 1947 he was demonstrating a projector, the “Model A,” he’d cobbled together that, while far less fancy than one of those monstrous and beautiful Zeiss dumbbells, worked well. No, it didn’t have a spaceship bridge control console or razor sharp projection lenses—it didn’t have any lenses at all as a matter of fact, using simple pinhole projection for its stars. It didn’t even have a real star ball; instead of expensive globes, Spitz used a single weird-looking but easier to produce dodecahedron assemblage of flat pentagon-shaped panels (a shape suggested by Albert Einstein, which shows you the sort of company Armand kept) for the projector’s single “ball.”

Your high school gym wouldn’t suddenly become the Griffith planetarium with the purchase of a Spitz, no, but the thing was functional and had a big advantage in that almost any school or museum could have a Model A. Many soon did. Armand’s company continued on to greater and greater glory even after he sold out in the 60s and retired. Today, Spitz is still around and going strong, boasting that it is a world leader in planetarium technology. It’s now more focused on things like video projection systems than traditional projectors, true, but it’s nice to see the name and business live on.

The history of Spitz’s company is really incidental to our subject, though. What is important for us is the chance meeting between Armand Spitz and the chief of a company called “Harmonic Reed.” Harmonic Reed, as you might not be surprised to learn, was vested in producing toy musical instruments and, especially, harmonicas. When its chief executive happened to sit in on one of Spitz’s demonstrations of his Model A, however, history was made. This dude, Thomas Leveridge, had an idea that turned out to be a brilliant one. Spitz's projector was basically a very simple device. Why couldn’t a toy be produced on the same general principles, but even simpler and cheaper?

The eyes of the nation’s kids were ever so slowly beginning to turn to the skies as NACA and the infant space program ginned up, and everybody was downright captivated by the spacemen and space monsters that danced across 50s movie screens and newfangled TV sets. It seemed to Mr. Leveridge that a toy planetarium projector would be a natural for a company that wanted to branch out from harmonicas and toy organs, something that wasn't exactly a growth industry any more.

Armand Spitz apparently thought this was a capital idea, and agreed to join forces with the harmonica bunch to produce a toy planetarium. There was one immediate stumbling block, though. Leveride thought, probably correctly, that a round star ball would be more attractive and appealing to kids and parents than the strange soccer-ball like assemblage of flat pentagons that was the Model A. Unfortunately, that was easier to say than do. Creating a molding machine that would form a perfect hemisphere while punching hundreds of star-holes into it turned out to be a daunting task.

Nevertheless, Harmonic’s machinist, Hans Lingenfield, persisted. Despite his persistence, however, by the time the annual New York Toy Fair, an insanely significant event for toy-makers, arrived he’d been able to fabricate a grand total of two Spitz “Juniors,” the initial name for the little projector. These two examples caused, if not a stir, at least some interest at the shindig, and when Hans cracked the star ball code shortly after, Junior went into production, where it continued for the better part of two decades to the tune of over one million projectors.

The finished product was both beautiful and functional (and today looks breathlessly retro-attractive). Yes, Tom was right about the star ball. The 7-inch glossy black (later blue) hemispheres were joined by a rubber gasket, giving Junior a futuristic Saturn/flying saucer look. The initial projector, which was powered by AC current, was equipped with a rheostat to simulate the coming of dusk and dawn, a little lighted arrow pointer for the “lecturer” to use while showing off wonders, and, possibly best of all, a 30+ page richly illustrated booklet written by Armand Spitz himself. How much for all these Good Things? Aye, there’s the rub. When Junior debuted in 1954, the price was $14.95. Depending on how you do the math, that’s roughly equivalent to $115.00 today, downright extravagant back then, escially for those of us in the lower middle class. Despite this hurdle, the Spitz Junior sold well enough that the company began to add other astronomy related products.

One of these was the Moonscope, a Gilbert reflector lookalike (prettier, though), but that is a story for another Sunday morning. Planetarium-wise, not long after the Spitz Junior hit the streets, Armand Spitz and Harmonic Reed came up with a follow-on projector, the legendary “Sky Zoo.” Rather than a star ball, the Zoo featured a sky globe emblazoned with constellation pictures. These were of the proper size to be projected over the Spitz Junior’s constellations when the Sky Zoo was set up next it.

Couldn't afford both? As an alternative to a complete Sky Zoo projector, Spitz offered just the constellation picture globe, which could be mounted on Junior in place of the star ball. Naturally, Harmonic strongly suggested parents buy the complete Sky Zoo instead. Alas, the Zoo was a humongous bust, selling no more than a couple of thousand units at best (which is why they are such collectors' items today) and was quickly discontinued. That didn’t mean you couldn’t enjoy the funky little pictures of Cassiopeia, Sagittarius and the rest, though. Following the cancellation of the Zoo, Harmonic added a little-bitty constellation picture projector and slides to the Spitz Junior. This small plastic unit fitted over the illuminated pointer in place of the arrow.

Amazingly enough, given the somewhat outré nature of the toys as compared to Slinkies or even chemistry sets, the failure of the Sky Zoo didn’t stop Harmonic and Spitz from introducing new planetarium products. One very impressive addition was an upgraded Spitz Junior aimed at schools. This advanced model featured a standard Junior to which had been added a motorized drive for the star ball and a dome illuminator. For that dome illuminator to be of any use, you naturally had to have a dome, and Spitz provided one, a 10-foot aluminum and canvas rig. At 150 smackers, the complete outfit was definitely aimed at educators; not us rugrats.

Spitz/Harmonic Reed did produce one more popularly priced variation on the Junior as the 1960s came in, the The Spitz Junior Portable. This was a somewhat simplified projector powered by D batteries rather than AC, which lacked both the rheostat (there was a “bright/dim” switch) and the constellation picture projector. It did come with a somewhat functional AA powered arrow pointer. The advantage? No AC meant it could be used anywhere, mom and pop didn’t have to worry about Bud and Sis electrocuting themselves, and it could sell for considerably less.

And that’s the way it was until the late 60s, when the changes began to come thick and fast. The stories of Spitz Laboratories and Harmonic Reed are intertwined and a little confusing, but what happened more or less is as that Armand Spitz retired in 1969, selling his company to McGraw Hill. After the Main Man’s departure, Harmonic Reed chose to spin-off the “science” part of their company. But that was not the end of their planetarium projectors. Hardly.

Not only did they continue selling the toy, which was now being called the “Nova Home Planetarium,” they came out with some much fancier projectors for sale to secondary schools, culminating in the famous Nova III, which sold for far less than anything Zeiss (or even upstart Japanese Goto) offered and did almost as much. Our little friend the Junior—err, “Nova Home Planetarium”? He struggled on until the early 70s and faded away. Why? The tenor of the times, I reckon. Following the end of Apollo and the Vietnam Hangover, most Americans, kids and adults, had had enough of space for a while. An “expensive” pinhole star projector? No way, dude. Hip 70s youth preferred pet rocks and mood rings.

My experience with the Spitz Junior goes back to the early 1960s. Oh, I may have noticed it in the Sears Wishbook (Christmas catalog) or similar a time or two in the late 50s, but it hadn’t made much of an impression. The first time I laid eyes on one and it made sense to me what the danged thing was good for was one sunny afternoon at Gayfer’s. Back in the 60s and into the 70s, almost every city of any size had a home-grown department store.

Those have long since been gobbled by the big chains, but back then our premier store, occupying a substantial portion of a block of downtown real estate, was the locally owned Gayfer’s. Mama liked to do her clothes shopping in this borderline hoidy-toidy outfit on those occasions when she could afford to—it was a little upscale for the likes of us. When she was able to visit the Big Store, she tended to park me in the toy department (perfectly safe in them days). Gayfer's collection of toys was small, e’en ‘round Christmas time, but, like the rest of the store, it was quite an upgrade compared to Woolworth’s and Kress. Well I remember staring longingly at a beautiful and gleaming Schwinn Jaguar bicycle and almost convincing myself I could have one for Christmas (I was lucky to get a Sears bike that year).

At some point, Gayfer’s had begun to display a few “science toys” in a corner. There wasn’t a Gilbert reflector, alas, but there were some mighty fancy chemistry sets. And the Spitz Junior. I suppose what initially attracted my attention was the insanely gaudy box, but the projector itself was fascinating too. Scanning Armand’s little book, which was laid out beside Junior, I finally had an epiphany: This thing would project the stars on the walls and ceiling of your room. Somehow that just seemed cool. Not only would it be outasight, I thought, to turn the Spitz on and “fly” my toy Mercury capsules around in deep space, maybe I could actually learn the names of stars and constellations with the aid of the funny looking contraption.

This was a while before the events of Stephanie’s Telescope, and I had yet to set my sights on a scope of my own, but knowing the stars and constellations seemed a worthy pursuit. Only problem? The price tag. Junior had begun at $14.95, but the price had begun to creep up before long, goin’ to $19.95 by the end of the 50s (albeit with constellation, satellite, Saturn, and Solar eclipse slides included) and topping out at 30 dollars at the end of the 60s. I don’t know what the fare was that afternoon in Gayfer’s, but it was enough to eliminate it as a birthday gift, and make it very dicey even for Christmas. Not that I didn’t put it on my list, but Sears was apparently not selling the Spitz Junior at the time, and if it didn’t come from Sears (where you could put stuff on lay-a-way, a time payment plan) Mama, Daddy, and Santa said Forget About It.

There things might have remained but for the kindness of one of my teachers. Or, actually, not one of my teachers. Miss Atkins taught at Kate Shepard Elementary, but I was not in her class, which was both fortunate and unfortunate. The teacher I had that year, Miss Stinson, was far younger and, I thought, considerably more glamourous. Unfortunately she was also a more down to earth sort than Miss Atkins.

Miss A., I understood, was, almost unbelievably, like me, obsessed by the Great Out There, and routinely treated her students to extensive space and astronomy “units.” Miss Stinson, on the other hand, was more obsessed by The New Math. I admittedly found things like “sets” purty darned fascinating, but not as fascinating as outer space, for gosh sakes. Anyhoo, one day Mama arrived home from one of her Church Circle meetings bearing a sizable box, “Miss Atkins thought you might like to borrow this for a while. She bought it for her son, but he’s off to college now.” Oh. My. God. The box festooned with its near psychedelic vistas of starry-eyed boys and girls could only contain one thing, a Spitz Junior!

Off to my room I went. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but hoped for good things. I was not disappointed. Even with the room fairly bright despite me snatching my blanket off the bed and tucking it over the windows, a flick of the switch and the stars showed up purty as could be. That was just the beginning. While I now had the Tasco 3-inch, and was beginning to be able to pick out star-patterns with some alacrity, there is no doubt the little toy helped me round-out my constellation knowledge. But that warn’t the real fun.

The real fun was writing and producing planetarium shows for the folks and my buddies. I had never been to a real planetarium, mind you, but I’d seen the Griffith scene in Rebel Without a Cause and thought I had an idea what one should be like (I did finally get to a real dome a few years later, Miami’s Space Transit Planetarium, which sported, yes, a Spitz Laboratories projector). When I was closing out the folks’ house after Mama’s passing, I hoped against hope to turn up some of my laboriously typed “scripts.” No dice, but I remember them well enough; especially what I considered my greatest triumph, The Coming of the Stars of Winter: “Behold, boys and girls, the majesty of the great hunter Orion rising in the east.” I don’t know if family and friends actually enjoyed my shows, but at least they pretended to.

It was a sad time, you betcha, when Miss Atkins finally (months later) asked for the return of Junior. I wasn’t crushed, though. I now had that other Junior, the Palomar Junior, to focus on, and contented myself with the thought that the little Spitz had served its purpose. It had helped me finish learning the sky and I had sure had a lot of fun with my shows. Oh, I did try to recreate the Spitz myself using plans for a “tin can planetarium projector” I found in Patrick Moore and Percy Wilkin’s How to Make and Use a Telescope. Cain’t say how well that might have worked (Armand Spitz made one for his daughter, I understand), since Li’l Rod, lazy then as now, gave up shortly after punching/drilling the holes for Ursa minor in the end of a coffee can. As for Spitz and company, I can’t say I thought much about ‘em over the next 30 or so years, except maybe to note that the little projectors had suddenly disappeared from Edmund’s catalogs and the toy store shelves. It was not until I had a space crazy kid of my own that I began to think of stars on the ceilin’ again.

I don’t know if she’ll ever be a real amateur astronomer (whatever the hell that is), but my daughter Lizbeth has enjoyed observing with me over the years, and went through a phase when she was about ten when, just like her old man at that age, she was fascinated by the constellations and the myths that go with them: “Daddy, my favorite constellation this week is Lyra. Do you know what a Lyre is?”

One afternoon, as Lizbeth and I were wont to do, we were inventorying the shelves of Toys ‘r Us, probably looking for one of the Polly Pockets sets which Lizbeth still enjoyed, when she emitted a very definite “DADDY, I WANT THAT!” “That” turned out to be the Space Theatre Planetarium. It was about 25 bucks, but I decided “What the hell?” Lizbeth rarely asked for expensive toys; 25 bucks was a lot less than the Spitz had been that day in Gayfer’s; and, well, just because I could. I gotta say the sight of that box showing kids and parents in ecstasy over stars on the ceiling sent a wash of memories over me not to be denied.

Lizbeth was at least as thrilled with her planetarium as I’d been with the Spitz. Me? I couldn’t help making comparisons. The Johnny-Come-Lately’s biggest shortcoming as far as I was concerned was its lack of a star ball. Instead, it used barely convex top-mounted slides to project stars that, unlike Junior’s, were displayed mostly on the ceiling. The projection admittedly looked pretty good, but not as realistic as the Spitz’s room-filling sky. As simple as the Spitz Junior was, it projected brighter stars, too. The surface of the ball was larger than that of Lizbeth’s slides, allowing the Junior’s pinholes to be somewhat bigger, letting more light through. The Space Theatre did have one significant advantage in that its slides could be changed for others—which showed, for example, only the stars of summer, etc. Not a bad little toy, but I was surprised it wasn’t better than my old friend 40 years down the road.

I slowly became aware that, far from being dead, the home planetarium, at least as a toy, seemed to be making a comeback. I began to keep my eye out for new projectors on the shelves at Toys ‘r Us and the (late, lamented) Discovery Channel Store and Ebay, even picking up a few whose price wasn’t too outrageous. One thing I noticed immediately was that while there were quite a few star projectors on sale, very few were true planetarium projectors. Most were more in the nature of celestial globes with illuminators at their centers allowing them to project black stars on a white sky. Not realistic, no, but not necessarily all bad. These projectors tend to be quite useable in less than perfectly dark rooms, and their surfaces are often emblazoned with extras like constellation labels, the ecliptic, the Celestial equator, and even a few clusters and nebulae. My example, the Star Theatre, even sports glow-in-the-dark stars and a built in compass on its base, and is quite useable as a (small) celestial globe.

I wasn’t satisfied, though. I wanted a home planetarium. For a couple of years it appeared I’d best forget that. Then the Japanese planetarium craze began. I don’t know what prompted the Japanese consumer to become interested in home planetariums, maybe the fact that from places like Tokyo it’s impossible to see all but the brightest stars and the Milky Way is forever invisible. Anyhoo, Japanese companies, and particularly Sega, began producing home projectors that are anything but toys.

Sega's Homestar series almost takes the home planetarium into the 21st century, and some models definitely take it beyond the toy category. Models? Yep. These things are so popular in the East that the company has produced at last count five distinctly different projectors, including one that floats in your bathtub and produces a starry sky to soothe you during your ablutions (!). The Sega planetariums top out with the Homestar EX(tra), which is designed for use in schools or, Sega says (don’t ask me why), in nightclubs. The EX goes for 800 dollars U.S., a rather daunting price, yeah, but the less expensive Homestar and Homestar Pro are now available to U.S. consumers for reasonable amounts thanks to that undying force in the toy bidness, Uncle Milton (the antfarm folks), with the base model projector costing just above 100 bucks.

Are these units better than the old Spitz? In some ways, yes. The Pro, for example, uses a superbright LED for projection, makin’ it much brighter than a Junior running with the rheostat pegged. They also offer niceties such as motorized sky rotation, shooting star projection, and interchangeable star slides that enable the user to see the sky with or without constellation stick figures. That’s nice, but the slides are also the weakness of these units. Like Lizbeth’s humble Space Theatre, the use of slides means the virtual sky is only on the ceiling. If you can live with that, though, you might be right happy with a Sega. It is light-years ahead of the Spitz in many ways. The stars are focused with a lens, making them oh-so-much sharper than pinhole stars, and the number of stars projected makes the Junior’s “almost 400” laughable. Including the Milky Way (yes!) the base Homestar projects 10,000 stars; the EX (not yet for sale in the U.S.) kicks that up several notches to 140,000 .

Would I spend a C-note plus on one of the Homestars? I’ve thought about it, but it seems I’ve satisfied my home dome lust in a way that probably makes me happier than even the EX would. I was browsing the eBay one afternoon as I sometimes do, and ran across a mint Portable Junior for a surprisingly reasonable cost—less than 50 bucks. When I first began to see Spitz Juniors on the ‘Bay, they was outrageously priced, but luckily for us planetarium fans, vendors soon realized toy collectors weren’t overly interested in these obscure things and prices dropped sharply.

When my unit arrived, I found that, for once, the eBay ad had been accurate. Save for a little corrosion on the battery terminals, it was near mint and beautiful. I wasted no time getting it into a dark room, just like on that long ago 1965 afternoon. A flip of the switch, and…it might be too much to say I was in ecstasy, but I was impressed all over again. Maybe it’s that I live where the sky is terrifically light-polluted and blocked by too many trees, but, if anything, the ceiling sky was even more magical-seeming than it was Back in The Day. You’ll prob’ly be relieved to know I’ve been able to exercise some restraint and have not made Miss Dorothy sit through (too many) of my still corny planetarium shows. Lizbeth and I, however, have amused ourselves many a time with productions that include a recreation of The Coming of the Stars of Winter.

How shall I continue to satisfy lust for the Indoor Sky? I hope the Homestar EX will soon arrive on our shores at a more manageable price. And I’ll continue to hope somebody, someday will market an affordable widget that will project Stellarium and my other computer planetariums on the ceiling. But till one of those things happens, I’ll just continue my quest for a cheap and good (non portable) Spitz Junior; one with that prized Sky Zoo attachment. Whatever comes down the pike, rest assured that on any given cloudy Possum Swamp evenin’ you are likely to find your Old Uncle relaxing and reminiscing under stars on the ceiling.

If you’re as obsessed by these old toys (and home planetariums in general) as Unk, why not jine-up with my Spitz Junior Yahoogroup? Despite the name, discussions of all home planetariums old and new are more than welcome. Another excellent resource for stars on the ceiling fans is the HPA, the Home Planetarium Association. Want to ogle an amazing collection of pro projectors? Stroll through the Planetarium Projector Museum. Check 'em out, muchachos.

“Used scopes” seems to be on lots of folk's minds of late. No doubt because of a recession that makes even those of us lucky enough to still be gainfully employed skittish when it comes to spending lotsa bucks for a new SCT. If we can save moola by buying a CAT only used once a year by a little old lady from Pasadena, we will save that moola.

My old friend
You make me feel young again.
My old friend
You're just as pretty as you were back then.

--John Hiatt

P.J. ain’t the ’57 Les Paul of telescopes, muchachos. That would have to be a Unitron or a Cave, I reckon, but my old friend, my humble 1966 Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior, is every bit as beautiful in my eyes and under my hands as that guitar or those beautiful telescopes must be to their lucky owners.

If you ain’t quite sure what Unk is yakkin’ about now, let me refer you back to the story of my second telescope. Go read that. I’ll wait. For the rest of y’all? Yeah, I know I keep going on and on about this subject. Maybe that’s a consequence of getting older. 43 years later, the days of Gemini and Star Trek (the REAL Star Trek) and, yes, Edmund Scientific are deliciously nostalgic. ‘Course, that requires conveniently forgetting what went on in the Mekong Delta, what happened to Vernon Dahmer, and what Richard Speck did. There was plenty of bad stuff going down in 1966 and much more to come, but at my advanced age them rose-colored glasses work better and better.

Humor me, y’all, and I promise we’ll leave My Pal in the past for a while after this. Anyhow, what I wanna talk about today is different. I don’t want to talk about how I got my little 4.25-inch reflector, or how much fun we had for years; I’d like to update y’all on what finally and recently has happened to the little feller. With the aid of my buddy Pat Rochford, some very nice people on the Cloudy Nights Classic Telescopes forum, and a few brain cells Unk thought he had burned out long ago, PJ is back.

Let's back up just a wee bit, though. As I recounted in “Me and My Pal,” I was shocked to discover the condition of my old friend when I returned to Possum Swamp in 1980. Mama had apparently gone through another of her periodic THIS HOUSE IS FULL OF JUNK AND I WILL NOT HAVE IT episodes a couple of years previously. Not only did she exile quite a bit of the Old Man’s ham gear to the carport utility room (don’t ask me how he managed to get an entire BC-610 transmitter past her and into the house in the first place), she soon locked her steely gaze on the Palomar Junior positioned in the middle of my old room. Rather than face her wrath, no doubt, the OM and my brother duly moved the scope to a corner of the carport.

I want you to understand that Mama did not do this out of malice. She was a thoughtful woman in those days. Surprisingly so, given her way-out-in-the-country upbringing. Hell, she was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for years and years and was instrumental in turning me on to SF (if the real credit for that belongs to my 4th grade teacher, who insisted I read Rocketship Galileo). Despite this, Mama just didn’t get my obsession with astronomy and telescopes, and no doubt reasoned that since I was not around, there would be no reason not to exile Junior to the carport. It would be just fine there, I’m sure she believed.

Speaking of SF, have you ever read one of the stories that takes advantage of Einstein’s Twin Paradox? You know, an astronaut goes on a deep space mission in a craft that attains a significant fraction of the speed of light. When he comes home ever’thing is definitely not A-OK. His twin brother, his galfriend, everybody he knew, is either senile or six feet under while he remains obscenely young. That’s just the way I felt when I saw the shape my ol’ Pal was in.

The OTA didn’t look that bad. Well, except for the focuser. Its beautiful black finish had been obscured with a shade of electric blue. The mount was the sad thing. Its wonderful gray “crackle” finish was all gone; it was now that weird blue, too. Worst of all, though? Lookin’ into the tube aperture (which was not in the least protected by the remnants of an old plastic dry-cleaning bag), there was more bare glass than aluminum on the primary. Maybe there were a couple of quarter sized spots that was still shiny, but that was it. The finder? It was still there, now painted the same shade of blue as the focuser, but exposure had corroded the chrome focus-barrel at the objective end of its tube. A glance through the dirty eyepiece showed no sign of crosshairs.

Was I P.O.ed? You bet. Did I have a hissy fit? Naw. What would the point have been? It was clear what had happened and there was no going back. The Pal and its optics had been somewhat protected for a while. But then the plastic cover I’d fashioned for the scope got removed and lost or used for something else, the aperture covers disappeared, and generations of spiders began to call it “home.” Just before my return, the OM had tried a limited rehabilitation, repainting the mount and focuser in misguided but well-meaning fashion. What a shame, but as I mentioned in “Me and My Pal,” I now had a nice Orange Tube C8 and quite a few other things—like getting started in an engineering career—to occupy my mind over the next seven or eight years.

By the late 80s, though, I had more time on my hands, and the discovery of a manila envelope chock-full of the Moon pictures the OM and I had taken back in the 60s provided the impetus to finally do something about PJ. I hauled the little telescope out of storage, gave it a quick once-over cleaning, pulled the primary and secondary, and sent them off to be recoated. The finder looked hopeless, so I replaced it with a 6x30 single-ring job I bought from Old Man Novak--y’all remember Kenneth Novak, doncha? He was the king of telescope parts from the 60s all the way through the 80s. The mount? It still, almost unbelievably, moved more-or-less smoothly, so I left it alone. Same with the rack and pinion focuser. With the application of a little lube to the gears it worked well enough despite its odious color.

In due course, my little primary returned. Man, oh, man. The body might be in sorry shape, but the heart, the tiny 4.25-inch mirror, looked as good as ever. I got it back in its nice, adjustable cell and got PJ outside for a quick look-see. Takin’ into account that the street where my (ex) wife and I lived was streetlight and security light hell, the telescope did well. My basic impression was that despite conditions much worse than what they’d been from the folks’ yard back in the 1960s, I could see more with My Pal than I ever saw back then. No, I still couldn’t pick-out many/any stars in M13, and M57’s donut hole was hard to see, but even under the poor skies M22 gave up sparklers and M8 looked far more extensive than back in The Day. In part maybe because I had 20 more years observing experience under my belt, but mainly because the eyepieces I was using, Kellners and Orthoscopics from Orion’s old Explorer Series and Celestron’s Circle Ts, were light-years better than the primitive and uncoated Ramsden and Kellner that came with the scope.

Did I use Junior? Oh, hell yeah. For the next three or four years gobs of photons went down the OTA on a regular basis. The then-Editor of my club’s newsletter asked if I’d do a column for him, and I hit on the idea of a series that demonstrated what could be seen of the deep sky from light polluted areas, including with small scopes like My Pal. That series of columns, which I called “From City Lights to Deep Space,” became the basis for a book a decade later, The Urban Astronomer’s Guide. I used bigger and “better” scopes for the observations that went into Urban Astronomer, too, but there’s plenty of Pal in there. It would, in fact, not be out of line to say the book would not have been written without the little Edmund.

Most of those Pal Junior observations were culled from my logbooks from the late 80s, though. By the mid 90s the little scope had gone back into hibernation, now in Chaos Manor South’s Massive Equipment Vault upstairs. Last time I remember using it was at a club public star gaze on the occasion of a Lunar Eclipse. I was between grab ‘n go telescopes at the time, so PJ stepped into that role (though you couldn’t grab that pedestal mount and go very fast with it) on an evening that was Sucker Hole City.

And that was that until I started thinking about my poor ol’ scope again last year. What turned my mind down that dusty corridor was a blog entry I wrote that concerned another old telescope of mine, the Tasco 11-TE I used for a while when I was in the Air Force. I mentioned the Palomar Junior in that piece, and as is the case lately with quite a few things from the old days, the little Pal began to be increasingly in my thoughts. That culminated in the complete article about PJ. At the end of that entry, I mentioned I intended to completely restore the telescope in 2009. I had thought about doing that quite frequently, but didn’t seem able to resolve to get to work till I put it down on paper. I then felt committed to what I was nevertheless afraid might be an overwhelming task.

Step One was an assessment of what needed to be done. One rainy weekend afternoon (we’ve had a lot o’ them lately), I opened the door to the Vault, carefully navigated the towering and teetering stacks of old Sky and Telescopes, and eventually maneuvered my way to the dark corner where My Pal had been sitting for better than a decade. When I removed Junior’s protective trash bag, I was pleasantly surprised. My memory told me the Edmund was a mess, but my eyes saw different. The paintjob on the OTA was actually pretty good. Oh, it would need a new one, but the OM had done well, and it wouldn’t require a crazy amount of sanding. There were quite a few holes in the OTA that would need filling—holes drilled by me or the OM at various times over the years for installation of handles, auxiliary finders, and other stuff. Yes, the focuser was painted that odd blue, but the paint had been applied lightly and evenly and the crackle finish beneath was still prominent. I figgered a thin coat of black and it would be as good as new.

More difficult would be the replacement of a focuser knob. One of the last times I’d had the scope outside, one of the knobs had literally crumbled to dust in my fingers. The finder could probably be reworked, but I thought replacing it might be best and easiest. If I could find a replacement, which I doubted I could. A peek at both the primary and secondary mirrors showed their surfaces looked good after 20 years since their last trip to the coater’s and would be fine.

PJ’s GEM mount was still functional, but would need considerable work. Not a trace of the lovely gray-crackle finish remained on mount or pedestal. It had obviously been heavily sanded prior to the coat of black gloss spraypaint. I assumed that was because the mount had become badly corroded after a few years in the folks’ uber damp carport (where pore Junior rode out the notorious Hurricane Frederick). I further noted that some parts that shouldn’t have been painted had been and would need cleaning. Some bare metal parts that had not been painted showed some rust and/or a thick layer of grime and would need a large helping of elbow grease. Finally, something was wrong with the declination setting circle, but I could not figure-out what. It was mounted at the lower end of the dec housing and was upside down. It appeared, though, that it would be impossible to move it to the scope-cradle end of the dec shaft where I seemed to recall it used to be, as in that position it would interfere with the RA circle. I’d have to think that one over.

As I always do before undertaking any kind of ATM project, I consulted with my best buddy, Pat, before doing a blamed thing. He had just completed a similar restoration of his first scope, a 60-mm Sears (“Circle T”) refractor. I told him I’d like to do the same thing with my second scope, the Palomar Junior. Not only did Pat allow as how he thought that was a good idea, he was enthusiastic to get to work on the Pal. Pat is one of those creative and talented individuals who simply cannot abide being without a project of some kind. He’s lucky to have me as a friend, as I for sure send plenty of work his way. I am handy enough at things electronic, but when it comes to mechanical issues and paint, expect disaster. The first step would be for me to see if I could acquire the parts—a focuser knob or two and a replacement finder. I warned him this would probably take a while if it were successful at all. I imagined I’d spend weeks and months scourin’ the danged eBay and Craig’s List and spendin’ way too much moola.

Little did I know salvation was only a few mouse clicks away at Cloudy Nights. As most of y’all know, the Cloudy Nights website, which used to mainly be notable for its scope and gear reviews, also has a full array of astro forums. Actually, these days the CN Forums are probably even more popular than the site’s reviews. Among the topics of these numerous and excellent groups is “Classic Telescopes.” What you will find on this Bulletin Board (that shows how long I’ve been in the online astronomy game) is continuous discussion of old telescopes, with a slant toward the 60s and 70s and to refractors, especially small and famous refractors of Japanese origin made by Unitron and others. But there is considerable talk about old reflectors, too, including even small ones like My Pal. More important than the “what,” though, is the “who.” Classic Scopes is inhabited by some of the friendliest, smartest, and just gull-derned nice folks it’s ever been my pleasure to be associated with in amateur astronomy. There are never flames nor backbiting; just good folks sharing their love for classic telescopes, often the scopes of their youth.

I wasn’t overly hopeful given Classic Scopes’ orientation to refractors, but I posted a holler for help anyway, saying I was desperate for a Palomar Junior focus knob and finder. Almost immediately, I got not just advice, but multiple offers to give (not sell) me the parts I needed. It seemed impossible, but in just a little while I had those knobs in hand along with a replacement pinion gear and the washers to go with it “just in case.” And not long after, a box arrived in the mail with a near-pristine 6 x 23 Palomar Junior finder inside. All else I needed to get started was paint.

That, it became obvious, would be the next problem. I found out the spray paint companies had discontinued the crackle/crinkle finish gray paint that was the Pal mount’s trademark. I talked this over with Pat, and we decided that—for now at least—the thing to do would be to paint the mount with a layer of the “texture finish” spray paint that’s now in vogue and overcoat that with gray. Paint and parts in hand, it was time to deliver my charge to Pat, who’d begin to work his magic.

Once Mr. Pat gets started on a project, he goes full bore. Still, I was a mite surprised to hear from him barely a week later: “Finished!” We made plans for me to come out and take First Light the next evening, Sunday. Naturally, Sunday dawned to blue skies that slowly began to cloud to near full overcast by early afternoon. Such is life in The Swamp. Pat called wanting to know if I was still coming out and to make a confession. With a nice moon hanging in the sky Saturday night, he couldn’t resist takin’ a peep with PJ. I wouldn’t say Pat had been a doubter when it came to my tales of Junior’s optical prowess, but I think he was maybe jus’ a mite skeptical.

There was a tinge of awe in his voice now, though, “Rod, that little mirror is damned good.” I wasn’t surprised; that’s what I’d remembered. The outfit that made Edmund’s primaries, Upco Optics (they made Criterion’s Dynascope mirrors as well), was renowned for quality, and they’d lavished plenty even on this little spherical mirror. It has a very good figure and is quite smooth indeed. I was pumped to hear somebody besides me praise PJ, though, and told Pat that clouds or no clouds, I’d be over to his place before sundown for our Half-Moon Star Party.

Why “Half-Moon Star Party”? There’d be a nice gibbous Moon hanging in the sky, and also in homage to the Cloudy Nights Classic Telescopes forum’s famous Full Moon Star Party of yore. No, we wouldn’t have any hulking Goto refractors (the Japanese company, not a go-to computer scope) or luscious Unitrons, just PJ and Pat’s Sears. Still, I expected it would be a lot of fun and a real blast from the past. As I headed east across Mobile Bay, I even began to muster a little hope we might actually see somthing. Yeah, the clouds were pouring across the sky like some dark and deep river flowing to a stygian sea, but they seemed to be mostly north of my destination, Fairhope. It was clear we wouldn’t be able to try the little scopes on the deep sky, but the Moon for sure. Maybe. And if I was truly lucky, Saturn perhaps. That would be a real coup, since the ringed wonder was one of the first objects I observed on the Pal’s real First Light night. It seemed like more than mere coincidence that on that evenin’ in 1966 the planet’s ring system was nearly edge-on, just as it would be again on this night.

When I arrived at Pat’s Stargate Observatory, I found he had the scopes ready to go, setup outside on the grass. Upon seeing the vista imaged above, I had to stop for a minute. If there’d been somewhere to sit, I would have had to sit. It was as if the intervening 43 years had all been swept away. The world was young again, a world where Americans dared to make dreams real, where young men aimed for the Moon with new rockets and youngsters like Little Rod dreamed of takin’ their place someday. Did I shed a tear? I’ll leave that to your imaginations. Once I got a grip, I took a close look at both scopes, starting with Junior, of course.

Pat had done a beautiful job. There would need to be a couple of little extra touches, I thought, but the scope was 99.9% of the way there. The Sears 60-mm? It just looked incredible, almost as if it had come off the factory floor yesterday. You’ll note that Pat refinished his ol’ pup in black and white instead of the scope’s original teal (?) and blue. He told me he had never liked the color of the scope, and who are we to gainsay that in the name of historical accuracy? These little telescopes are not antiques. Not yet, anyway. What’s important is not how closely you mimic their original condition, but how closely you reestablish the link they once had with your heart, and Pat had done a hell of a job of that with both telescopes.

That was how they looked. How did they work? The clouds had more or less moved out of the way by Sunset, and I wasted no time getting PJ pointed at the Moon. Despite some haze, Luna was beautiful. Incredibly sharp all across the field and very contrasty from terminator to limb. Yes, it’s a spherical mirror, but at nearly f/11 it’s able to perform incredibly well. With modern eyepieces, Pat’s TeleVue Plössls, the little scope was likely delivering better images than it ever had.

One other thing that no doubt helped was that the mirror was now center-dotted thanks to Pat, who’d also cleaned it. Yeah, at this focal length dead-on collimation is not as critical as it is in faster scopes, but every little bit helps. I didn’t bring any of my own eyepieces out, so I’ll be interested to find out how Junior does with something like a 16-mm UWAN. I still have both the ½-inch and 1 inch Ramsden and Kellner oculars (no danged metric system back then, little pards) that came with PJ, but haven’t located ‘em yet. Some months back, I put ‘em somewhere where they wouldn’t get lost, and, naturally, now I can’t remember what that place was.

Hows about PJ's GEM? After Pat’s rework, mostly cleaning and polishing the declination and RA shafts, the mount’s motions were every bit as smooth as I remembered them being in the summer of ‘66. The only slight downer now as then was the lack of tube rings. Point at certain areas of the sky, and the eyepiece ends up at weird angles. What to do? Just what I did way back when. Move the polar axis off north, use the thing as a “mutant-alt-az,” and just keep on trucking. I noticed the scope seemed less vibration-prone than I remembered. Did Pat’s TLC help that, or am I maybe just getting a mite more forgiving in my old age? Little of both, I reckon. If necessary, I believe it will be possible to position Celestron’s vibration suppression pads under the pedestal leg tips.

On to the Sears. This little refractor is a “Sears,” of course, only in the sense that they sold it. It was actually made by the well-regarded Japanese optical firm Towa. Like Tasco, back in them days Sears (and Montgomery Ward) were importing some excellent, well-made telescopes. One look through Pat’s baby showed it to be no exception. Despite the fact that there was a between-the-elements smudge in the little 20-mm eyepiece (likely the Canada balsam used to cement ‘em together was givin’ up the ghost after 40 years), the Moon was mind-blowingly sharp. I can’t wait to try the scope with the pair of good “Diamond Z” .965-inchers I’ve got squirreled away for the day when I am able to replace my long lost Tasco 11-TE.

The Towa folks didn’t just slap a good objective in a cheap department store body, though. The Sears’ mount was a real eye-opener. Though it is EQ-1 sized (EQ-2 at a stretch, maybe) the difference in quality between this and today’s small Chinese GEMs is flat-out amazing. The motions are butter-dripping smooth, and the slow motion gears are oh-so-silky. Also amazing are the sweet little touches nobody would think of putting on a 60-mm refractor today. The RA and Declination slow motion cables, for example, have different shaped knobs on their ends, so you know which is which in the dark. Before this night, I was a confirmed 60-mm skeptic. Back in the day I thought ‘em “too small.” In this latter age, I’ve looked askance at the claims for their optical and mechanical quality I’ve read on the Cloudy Nights. After an evening with Pat’s 60, though, I’m a member of the amen chorus, brothers and sisters. These old scopes can be both a surprise and a joy. The quality is there.

‘T’warn’t long, unfortunately, before that cloud river changed course to run straight over our heads, blotting out even the Moon. No, I didn’t get a glimpse of Saturn, but that will come. Back home, with the Pal on display in the living room, I just sat and gazed at that long white tube and gray mount for half an hour, reliving our many happy times. The more I looked, though, the more something seemed wrong.

The declination circle just couldn’t go where it was. You’d have to stand on your head to read it. I pulled out a reference photo of a PJ I’d printed off, natcherly, the CN Classic Telescopes Gallery, and tried to figure out what the hail was going on. A little head-scratching and it became clear what the problem was. When the OM had reassembled the mount after its paintjob all those long years ago, he’d put it together with the declination housing upside down. One end of this housing is longer than the other, you see. He had the short end up instead of vice-versa. I took the mount back apart, flipped the dec housing around, put everythin’ back together, and there was now clearance for the dec setting circle to go in its proper place as seen in the photo. I also spent a little time cleaning the dec and RA shaft endcaps down to bare metal, their original condition, and fabricating an ersatz Pal Junior showercap/dustcover using a picture found on the CN (of course).

What comes next for Unk classic-scope-wise, muchachos? Well, I intend to keep my eye out for a Tasco white-tube 4.5-inch reflector, but there’s no hurry there. I find I’m just as anxious to do a lot of looking through the Palomar Junior as looking at it. I don’t know that I’ll get my old friend out every clear night (my CATs demand their ration of photons), but I know I will be outside with PJ a lot this summer, just like the hallowed summer of ’66, those innocent days just before the distractions of girls, cars, and rock and roll music when My Old Friend and I spent every sultry night wondering and wandering by starlight.