The Equipment

First: I gotta thank Leigh for indulging me in this.

Scopes

First to last.  The Jason 313 at my left hand is the one my dad bought me for Christmas when I was eight.  The Obsession Ultra-Compact 18 to my right is the end in a long series of small upgrades.  Alpha and Omega.

full length photo here

In the foreground is my 6" SCT and my 60mm SolarMax H-alpha scope.

That's pretty much all my scopes.  Everything else is history.

Light Buckets

8/30/11: a 17.5" f/4.5 Obsession-clone (well, a Kriege-based dobsonian, in any case).  Stumbled upon in it in Michigan.  It's still in boxes in the garage.  Got some assembling to do.
9/19/11: got it re-assembled and saw first light with it tonight.  Clouds were rolling in.  Star fields around Altair were visible, things looked good.  Saw a fuzzy Jupiter through some fog 5 degrees above the horizon. A ronchi eyepiece showed a good pattern, but I'm not sure I'd recognize a bad figure with one...  Cool! Nicknaming it "Coach" in honor of Grandpa Stokes.

Out East with it. 11/23/11. Awesome deep sky views.  Size matters.   8/12/2015: I had renowned  semi-local glass master Terry Ostahowski refigure the mirror for me.  It was a Coulter "blank" (spherical, not ground to parabolic yet). Says Terry: "The anneal on the 17.5" blank is very good, there will be no problem with stress in the glass. This optic came out beautifully, I'm very happy with it. It always makes me a bit nervous to work on thinner glass but this blank held it's own with no flexing." Shrehl: 0.97 (an excellent shape).

What make these scopes cool is that they break down into a surprisingly portable unit:

Note:  for perspective I had to toss in this photo of a really big scope.  This is Jon's 25" scope.  Jon is my sky and equipment mentor.  Another word for him is "enabler."  I find myself subconsciously chasing him. He has a man cave with, I don't know, thirty scopes.  Really high quality stuff.  I have a "man closet".  He got this scope in August.  I got my smaller knockoff in September.  His scope requires an 8-step ladder.  Mine requires a single step stool (it still qualifies as scope requiring a ladder, though. Technically.). Between the two of use we probably need a 12-step program.

Solar

My solar setup: stacked Solar Max II 60m and Baader Astrofilmed Nexstar6SE on a William Optics EzTouch.  I really like the bino on the H-alpha. I do this probably 4 days a week for 10-minute stints as a work break.  Very nice
see my old solar setup

Orion XT12g:  GoTo Dob!

Great value, easy setup (two trips to the car). Was primary scope until I got the 17.5" Truss.

Last time out east, with my Orions:  XT12g (w/ Stellarvue F80M finder) and 120mm f/5 achro:

I remember when I used to look reasonably good in photos.  Those days are gone, I guess.

4/2/10:  Haha, I had to include this picture.  There's been a lot of talk about "Man Caves" lately.  This is my office, which typically doesn't look like this.  My big scopes typically hang out in the guest room off the patio.  Grandma and Grandpa are staying there now, so I had to move the scopes into my office.  I sit in the middle of three scopes.  A very nice Feng Shui triangle. Note: the XT12i was sold and replaced with its GoTo twin the XT12g.

Miscellaneous Equipment

• http://gooutlookup.net/equip/equip_fun.htm
• Televue Everbrite 2" Diagonal
• Stellarvue Binoviewers (good for a while, but I can't get them collimated anymore (next project, maybe?))

I have this Meade  ETX-70 sitting in the garage, waiting for Dash to be old enough to abuse it only moderately (at 4, his abuse would be a little too much).  He'd also need to learn to read first (menu-driven).   It's a little small for anything other than very specific applications: star clusters, moon, maybe some large bright deep sky objects from very dark sites.  The plus is it's a great learner computerized scope. It will show you more that you can find by eye, especially if you know almost nothing about the sky.

Favorite Eyepieces

• Nagler 31 T5
• ES 20mm 100 degree
• ES  9mm 100 degree
• Nagler Zoom 3-6

Atlas:

1/14/10: Picked up, from the Bargain Rack, The New Atlas of the Stars, by Mellinger and Hoffman.  It's 30 photos of the sky, each with an overlay sheet with the annotation and a page of text and a handful of photos/insets.  Interesting because you get what the sky itself looks like with the option of using the "cheat sheet".  I found it very useful in a dark sky (Mammoth Lakes, CA).

For my old Equipment History (you do have a little too much time on your hands, don't you?)