Between my whizzy new Intes 6-inch Maksutov, the 60 mm modified Monolux/Meade refractor, and the somewhat scruffy 10x50 Ultraview binocular I bought out of Orion's "returned" cabinet, I haven't said anything for a while about the little 63 mm f/5.6 Brandon refractor I bought six months ago. Last night I had a chance to use the instrument for precisely the kind of thing I bought it for -- as a "quick look" telescope -- and it was a real winner. I have the stubby tube mounted on an inexpensive photographer's tripod with a reasonable pan head. The whole thing is an easy one-hand carry, and with the legs collapsed it is only about two feet long. I have a few eyepieces zipped up in a cloth bag like people put on their belts for ID when they are running, that I grab when I am in a hurry to go out and look at something.
On Friday, October 11, I had an evening social engagement with some friends who are a little interested in astronomy, but not too much. They include some of the people who were on the comet-Hyakutake-watching expedition I wrote about in the June Sky & Telescope. I was anxious to give them all a chance to look at some celestial sights, but I was running late, and did not have time to load a larger telescope into my car, so I grabbed the Baby Brandon and the eyepiece bag.
We met at a home in Los Gatos, a part of the San Francisco Bay area that has darker sky than where I live in Palo Alto; naked-eye visual limiting magnitude to the high south might have been as faint as 5. I grabbed my contribution to a pot-luck meal in one hand and the Brandon in the other. Just inside the kitchen door, I extended the tripod legs, sat the telescope down, and used it as a hat rack for the moment. Setup time was about 15 seconds. Everyone was intrigued by the fact that I had brought a telescope.
Several people were late. Did anyone want to look at some astronomy stuff while we waited? Sure! So I carried the Brandon outside and unlimbered a 28 mm and a 6 mm eyepiece. Thirty seconds after stepping into the yard, I was looking at Saturn. After the first enthusiastic "Ooh!", I had a line of viewers. We looked at Jupiter next, and then the rest of our party came, so I brought the instrument in again. Later in the evening we had another break, and I showed them M31 and the Double Cluster. More "Ooh!"s.
What made this use special was the extreme portability and ease of setup of the telescope. If I had needed five minutes to load a larger instrument into my car, I wouldn't have had time to do so, and if it had taken five minutes to set up at my friend's house, the mood was such that we wouldn't have bothered to observe. And if the telescope weren't a one-hand carry, I would likely have left it in the back of the car, where people would not have been intrigued by it, and where it would have been still less convenient to get it and set it up. One of my favorite sayings is "When opportunity knocks, open the door!", but sometimes it helps to leave the door ajar in the first place, and having an extremely portable and easy to set up telescope readily at hand is one way of encouraging interest in astronomy.