The most important and most energetic of all cubicles was that of Celestron, the most important telescope producer, based mostly in southern California. I had the chance to shoot a number of movies for Celestron at NEAF, a part of a collection we’re engaged on collectively, known as This Week in Astronomy. I hope you’ll tune in to see these movies on the 2 organizations’ websites, or on social media. Celestron’s offerings of recent telescopes and eclipse-related merchandise are fairly spectacular. The entire Celestron gang was out in drive, led by Corey Lee, and included Kevin Kawai, Kaitlynn Damron, and plenty of others.
NEAF is sort of a who’s-who of telescope producers. Additionally displaying its various merchandise was Sky-Watcher, led by Jeff Simon, with an enormous show of a number of strains of devices. Vic Maris and his Stellarvue firm was additionally current, and his high-end refractors are desired by many newbie astronomers. It was a terrific deal with to see Al and David Nagler and their large sales space showcasing Tele Vue Optics, and discussing Al’s heritage going all the way in which again to engaged on the Apollo program. They had been continuously busy and at all times chatting up adoring hobbyists. Equally, Scott Roberts of Explore Scientific had an enormous show, and even made stay broadcasts with quite a lot of personalities proper from NEAF. I used to be honored to affix him for a kind of.
There have been additionally some more moderen gamers who had been making a splash. Yves Smadja and his crew from Unistellar attracted nice consideration with their revolutionary telescopes, lots of that are used for simple imaging. Rick Hedrick and his crew from PlaneWave, celebrated for producing the most important and most spectacular institutional scopes — and likewise for well-supplied amateurs — had been all smiles and nice enjoyable to reconnect with. Stephen Mallia had a really spectacular sales space together with his Starfield scopes on show, and I used to be actually struck by them! And, in fact, many different stalwarts had been current once more — Astro-Physics, Takahashi, and plenty of others too.
It was nice to be again to an in-person NEAF and to reconnect with many readers and buddies as soon as once more. Let’s hope that momentum continues to select up and we have now a very regular world once more quickly, one that permits us to get pleasure from this astronomy curiosity we share to its fullest diploma.
David J. Eicher is Editor of Astronomy and writer of 26 books on science and historical past.
