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Pastimes : Ask Mohan about the Market -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joseph G. who wrote (10630)	12/9/1997 8:18:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 18056

Joe, Astronomical equipment is one of the great bargains of our time and the consumer has benefitted terrifically from price competition. All optical eqipment in fact. One the the great scams is the price of ordinary eyeglasses. A pair of simple single-vision lenses and frames can easily cost a person $120 even if they are essentially nothing more than reading glasses. For reading I get numerous pairs of glasses from Big Lots for $1.00 a pair and they work fine. It's the hocus pocus of prescription that inflates them. I get bifocals with spring-loaded frames included and in accordance with the ophthalmologist's prescription from Factory Eyeglasses for $49. A very good deal. But when you consider that for $35 you can get a pair of excellent binoculars with cemented/air-spaced three-element eyepieces, four prisms, cemented objectives, and a critically aligned frame, using special optical glasses ground to critical surface measurments--well, you see what a racket a lot of the eyeglass business is. This is typical of how the entire medical profession is profiting. A splint for my thumb that would cost $6.00 if sold at the K-Mart goes for $50 out of the Orthopedist's office because it is medically approved. But every occupation and profession has its corruptions and rackets. A college student whose parents are paying $30,000 a year could get exactly the same results as a literature course by spending about $15 at a used-book store and reading the books several times. Chemistry--no. The only totally honest working people I ever met ran a dairy farm in northern Illinois. My God! Did they work! But back to my telescope. No, I did not contribute to inflation. I paid about $850 then and the same equipment still costs about $850, a decline in real terms of maybe 75%. I helped support a nascent technology, the mass production of catadioptric (Schmidt-Cassegrain) telescopes that have made it possible for tens of thousands of amateurs to enjoy views every clear night that fifty years ago were only available to those who had access to a fairly well-equipped observatory. My investment paid off when I wrote a book about astronomical observatories that was picked up by the Macmillan Book Clubs. Not a lot of money but enough to be fun.