On a side note, I put the telescope together with the garage sale mount on the Meade legs. The garage sale mount works better for small adjustments since I don’t have the motors for the Meade mount. The Meade tripod is a lot better than the wooden legs the garage sale mount came with, so it all works out for the best. I’ll post some pictures in a week or two.

Thursday night I found a telescope for sale on Craigslist, a Meade
4504 4.5″. I knew from the price and make of the telescope that this
wouldn’t be the final telescope I ever wanted, but given the budgetary
constraints my wife has put me under, I figured it’d be ‘good enough
for now’. Several phone calls and a 20 minute drive later I was at the
owner’s house for a look at the telescope. The 4504 is shipped with a
Goto system which is notoriously questionable, but this one had been
lost and in any case I was more interested in the telescope itself than
the electronic starfinder. The owner had bought it used, but it was
obvious he had kept it clean and that it’d been well taken care of. 30
minutes and a little haggling later and I went home with my new tube.

Earlier in the day I had found a tripod and mount with hand driven mechanisms,
but I decided to give the Meade it’s first try with the tripod it came
with. Shortly before sunset I set it up in my backyard and left it out
there while I played some tabletop games with friends (St. Petersburg,
if anyone plays). After a couple of hours, shortly after 10 pm PDT, we
went out and started playing with the telescope. The first few stars
were very clear and bright, but otherwise unimpressive to the guys.
Then we found Saturn.

It’s hard to explain the thrill of seeing the rings around Saturn for the first time through your own scope; a
little fiddling and suddenly the rings came in with enough clarity to
take my breath away. Here was this tiny telescope in my own backyard
with enough resolution to be able to tell beyond a shadow of a doubt
that it was Saturn we were looking at. For nearly an hour we all took
turns at the scope looking at the little dot with a ring around it.
There were a number of accidental bumps and I had to resight each time,
but it was well worth looking at Saturn with the three different 1″
eyepieces that came with it. I’m 6′4″ and I’d set the scope at a
comfortable height for me, which made viewing extremely difficult for
anyone else. We finished up the night looking at the craters on the
moon, which turned out to be a good thing, since the brightness of the
moon all but ruined our night vision.

I’m an early riser and this morning was no exception, with a
dream waking me up at 5:45. Since the sun hadn’t really started to
lighten the sky yet, I decided it’d be a good time to take a look at
the stars again. I was half awake and just picked the brightest object
I could see in the southern sky. Imagine my surprise when it turned
out to be Jupiter and I could see four of it’s moons without even
trying. I tried to view it under higher magnification, but my
hamhandedness prior to coffee made all but the widest angle lens
unusable. Still, seeing one moon to the right and three to the left
was an impressive way to start the morning.

I like the Meade 4504, and for $60 it was a steal. If I really do decide I want to
continue with astronomy I’ll definitely need something better in the
long run. But as a first time telescope on a limited budget, it’s more
than met my expectations. I never suspected I’d be able to see as much
as I can with it. I’m going to place it on my garage sale tripod
tonight and play with it some more. The Meade tripod is touchy as all
get out, and I hope the other tripod will be a little easier to deal
with. I don’t like the fact that the eye pieces aren’t a standard
size, but I’ll figure out a way to deal with that sooner rather than
later. In the mean time, I’m readjusting the height of the tripod and
setting it up so the kids can view Saturn for themselves tonight.