Tour the Dark Ranger Telescopes...
Meet our 19 Telescopes!
Normally what we mean when we say "Telescope Tour" is a tour of the Universe as viewed through our telescopes. However, on this page we offer a tour of our telescopes themselves. We not only have the largest collection of BIG, "hands-on" telescopes in the 4-corners region (Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado), we also have a combined total of nearly a century of experience working with every kind of optical telescope imaginable. So, if you are interested in taking up the hobby (for yourself or a loved one), we are happy to offer you online advice in purchasing your 1st or even 5th telescope.
But if you're serious (or planning to spend serious money) about buying a telescope, join us for a private telescope tour. In the questionnaire that follows after "booking," mention how you want to experiment with different telescopes and we'll let you test drive a selection for a couple hours. Indeed, you can even request specific telescopes by name from the list below -- if the exact one isn't available on the night of your private telescope tour, we will set up something similar.
But if you're serious (or planning to spend serious money) about buying a telescope, join us for a private telescope tour. In the questionnaire that follows after "booking," mention how you want to experiment with different telescopes and we'll let you test drive a selection for a couple hours. Indeed, you can even request specific telescopes by name from the list below -- if the exact one isn't available on the night of your private telescope tour, we will set up something similar.
What's with the Weird Names?
Telescopes are different enough that it is easy to imagine their pros & cons as personalities. So, as Douglas Adams fans, all of our telescopes are named for characters and things from Douglas Adams's "5-part trilogy" The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2).
P.S. An eponym is the original for which something/someone is similarly named. Whereas namesake is the thing/person named after the eponym. Yeah... heretofore we didn't know that distinction either.
P.S. An eponym is the original for which something/someone is similarly named. Whereas namesake is the thing/person named after the eponym. Yeah... heretofore we didn't know that distinction either.
Total Perspective Vortex Make & Model: Starmaster f5
Design / Mount: Dobsonian non-goto Aperture: 20" Focal length: 2273mm Usable Magnification Range: 55-275x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, star-birth & star-death nebulae H2G2 Eponym: The Total Perspective Vortex (TPV) is a mental torture chamber designed to give you "some sense of proportion" namely to inflict life-changing humility by showing the entire Universe and your insignificance within it. Zaphod, one of its few survivors, took away from the experience that there were a lot of beings in the Universe that needed to meet him. Analogy: Dark Rangers emphasize both the humbling AND the empowering aspects of astronomy. While world leaders can always benefit from a healthy dose of humility, most humans get more inspiration from how the power of science can reason out the seemingly unknowable. Therefore, we strive to make sure each peek into our TPV inspires both at the same time. |
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Majikthise Make & Model: John Dowell 18"
Design / Mount: Dobsonian non-goto Aperture: 18" Focal length: 2057mm Usable Magnification Range: 50-200x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, star-birth & star-death nebulae H2G2 Eponym: Majikthise (pronounced magic-thighs) representing the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons, protested Deep Thought's 7.5-million year study of the answer to the ultimate question regarding the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Such an answer would put philosophers out of business. Analogy: The classic dobsonian design lacks both "go-to" robotics and the equatorial axis which allows a coordinate system (Right Ascension & Declination, computer guided or otherwise) for finding and tracking objects. They have long been criticized by "real astronomers" as being amateurish. Keep in mind, amateur means "lover of" not "non-expert." So, amateur astronomers retort with "Dobs are dumb telescopes only smart people can use." The not-so-subtle dig being professional astronomers lack the constellation literacy to star-hop their way to finding targets. However, like Majikthise and Vroomfondel, his philosopher protégé, John Dowell brand dobs have a secret duality (see below). |
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Vroomfondel Make & Model: John Dowell 16"
Design / Mount: Dobsonian non-goto Aperture: 16" Focal length: 1828mm Usable Magnification Range: 40-180x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, star-birth & star-death nebulae H2G2 Eponym: Vroomfondel's is Majikthise's barely helpful assistant-philosopher who likes to demand things like "the total absence of solid facts" which would curtail the ability of science to understand the natural world. Analogy: In the end, the philosophers realize there's money and fame in publicly maligning what science can and can't know. The irony of anti-science advocates going on chat-shows (their broadcasts made possible by satellites adjusted for relativistic effects) are not lost on us, in a world of science-hating cell phone users. We also see a more direct commentary on the silly tiff between professional and amateur astronomers (described above). "Push-to" technology allows for pairing a smart phone to the hidden computer onboard John Dowell telescopes. This dual capability ensures success for both precise data entry of the professional AND good intuitive aim of the amateur. |
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Deep Thought Make & Model: Celestron C-14-A-XLT
Design / Mount: SCT on CGE Pro (equatorial goto mount) Aperture: 14" Focal length: 3910mm Usable Magnification Range: 60*-475x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, globular clusters, star-death nebulae, planets, double stars, and Moon H2G2 Eponym: Deep Thought is the super computer that calculated that the answer to Ultimate Question regarding Life, the Universe, and Everything was 42. Sadly the aged Deep Thought could not calculate the question itself, but helped design an even greater supercomputer known as The Earth to do the job. Analogy: Nothing shatters the boundaries of "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" like a computerized telescope. Since seeing is believing for most Earthlings (including philosophers, theologians, and other professional thinkers), Deep Thought will provide you with stunning visual answers... as long as you carefully define the question. |
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the Earth Make & Model: Celestron C-14 Edge HD
Design / Mount: SCT on CGE Pro (equatorial goto mount) Aperture: 14" Focal length: 3910mm Usable Magnification Range: 100-475x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, globular clusters, star-death nebulae, planets, and double stars H2G2 Eponym: The Earth was the super computer designed by Deep Thought to calculate the Ultimate question regarding Life, the Universe, and Everything. Most of the galaxy mistakes it for an inconveniently located but otherwise mostly harmless little blue-green planet. Indeed it was destroyed by the Vogons just 5 minutes before the 10-million-year calculation was complete so as to make way for a sorely-needed hyperspace bypass. Analogy: For decades the Celestron 14" had all the answers any backyard astronomer could ask for. But with the advent of digital photography, the questions become more complicated like, "Is Pluto more pink than brown?" and "Has the orbit of that asteroid been plotted yet?" So the Edge HD design comes with extra optics that flatten the view to provide better color and a crisp focus all the way to the edges of the view. It still might take millions of years for this technology to figure out what the ultimate question really is but, in the meantime, the pictures and views will be crisp! |
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Moby
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Make & Model: Meade 1266 Research Grade
Design / Mount: Newtonian on equatorial with clock drive Aperture: 12.5" Focal length: 1912mm Usable Magnification Range: 50-225x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, open star clusters, and star-birth nebulae H2G2 Eponym: Moby is our name for the Sperm Whale that started 'life' as one of the planet factory, Magrathea's two defense missiles that were launched at the Heart of Gold. At the last second, the Heart of Gold's improbability drive turned one missile into an ill-fated Sperm Whale. Analogy: This white leviathan of a telescope was the best telescope money could buy during the early 1980s. And though it moans and groans from age as if whale song, to this day this model turns the most apathetic astronomer in the proverbial Captain Ahab. Where's the Adams connection? Views through this beast offer a thrill akin to suddenly becoming sentient while in free-fall. The good news is that, as long as you are careful coming down the required ladder, you'll have a much happier landing than this telescope's eponym. |
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Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz
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Make & Model: Orion SkyQuest Rental: $31/night
Design / Mount: Dobsonian "dumb scope" Aperture: 12" Focal length: 1500mm Usable Magnification Range: 40-200x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, open star clusters, and star-birth nebulae H2G2 Eponym: Jeltz is the Hitchhiker-hating Vogon captain whose poetry is almost as destructive as his con-[de]-structor fleet. Analogy: Known as Commander Jeltz to his friends (if he had any), this is a BIG and simplistic bruiser of a telescope. It slews and focuses like the ancient bureaucrat he is -- manually. At one point it had a guidance system, but when it inevitably broke there was no money in any future budget to repair it. So if you listen closely, you might just hear some horrible poetry as you steer it about the sky. But those aren't sounds of frustration so much as rationalization because for Jeltz, like any bureaucrat, the work is its own reward. |
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SlartiBartfast Make & Model: Celestron 11" HD
Design / Mount: SCT on a pier mounted on Celestron's CGX (equatorial go-to) Aperture: 11" Focal length: 2800mm Usable Magnification Range: 70-350x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, globular clusters, open star clusters, star-birth & star-death nebulae, planets, and double stars. H2G2 Eponym: Slartibartfast is a planetary designer who specializes in coastlines. While working on Earth at the planet-making planet of Magrathea, he won an award for making Norway's fjords. A strange but affable fellow, Slarti's take on the Universe is that, "The chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, 'Hang the sense of it!' and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day." Analogy: Adorned with a crazy assortment of colorful space stickers that only a planetary designer could love, Slartibartfast is our best astrophotography telescope. His optics are of high enough quality for astronomy research, yet we've finely tuned it for creating beautiful images of the Universe. All Dark Rangers love the science of astronomy, but a few of us also skirt the event horizon of astrophotography. When using excellent equipment like this under the unparalleled dark sky of the Dark Ranger Observatory, it's not quite the soul-sucking hobby it would be otherwise. Book a private tour and in 2-3 hours we can help you and your DSLR camera get 4-6 publishable images of deep space objects through this amazing telescope. |
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Trillian Make & Model: Celestron 11" Nextstar GPS
Design / Mount: SCT on CGX (equatorial go-to mount) Aperture: 11" Focal length: 2800mm Usable Magnification Range: 45*-350x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, globular clusters, open star clusters, star-birth & star-death nebulae, planets, double stars, and our Sun H2G2 Eponym: Trillian is the Earth woman mathematician and astrophysicist that Arthur Dent never managed to romance. He lost her to Zaphod because he had a spaceship. He lost her to Thor because he was a god. She ends up with Wowbagger which makes no sense. Analogy: Trillian is one of the most underutilized female characters in all of Science Fiction and that's saying something for a genera that is almost as sexist as astronomy itself. Douglas Adams often set her up to be smartest being in the room, and yet too often it's dumb luck that gets her and her colleagues out of scrapes. Readers always hoped that, like Princess Leia, Trillian would eventually come into her own, but she ends up being barely more than a failed romantic interest for Arthur. Her namesake telescope has similar problems. Our Trillian has the most precise tracking of any of our scopes. She's a Dark Ranger favorite because none of us need to doublecheck that she is still on target. Sadly, since she is a little smaller than the rest of the boys, she often doesn't get the attention from our guests that she deserves. |
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Marvin
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Make & Model: Celestron Nextstar Rental: $42/night
Design / Mount: SCT on GPS goto forked mount Aperture: 11" Focal length: 2800mm Usable Magnification Range: 70-350x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, globular clusters, star-birth & star-death nebulae, planets, and double stars. H2G2 Eponym: Marvin is the Paranoid Android with a brain the size of a planet (some kind of cloud processor maybe?). When properly motivated, he can be convinced to shake off his eternal depression to become a highly capable genius. Analogy: Our Marvin can also be a bit problematic. His optics are great, but his programming is a little out of date. He comes from the era of when computers were dumber and humans were smarter. So as long as one reads his boot-up instructions carefully, Marvin will show you the Universe as well as any modern go-to telescope, he just won't do it with quite as much enthusiasm. |
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Eddie
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Make & Model: Celestron Nextstar Rental: $42/night
Design / Mount: SCT on GPS go-to forked mount Aperture: 11" Focal length: 2800mm Usable Magnification Range: 70-350x Optimal Targets: Galaxies, globular clusters, star-birth & star-death nebulae, planets, double stars, and our Sun H2G2 Eponym: Eddie is the Heart of Gold's annoyingly helpful and disgustingly cheerful ship-board computer. Eddie is overjoyed to open and close automatic doors for his biological crew and yet wastes precious time with pleasantries when he's reporting inbound missiles. Analogy: Jaded geeks and especially astronomers find cute technology annoying. Yet, if you are an inexperienced telescope user, a charmingly user-friendly telescope might be exactly what you want. |
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Wowbagger
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Make & Model: Custom
Design / Mount: Wooden refractor on Meade LXD-650 (equatorial go-to mount) Aperture: 7" Focal length: 1422mm Usable Magnification Range: 30-300x Optimal Targets: Planets, open star clusters, double stars, our Moon. H2G2 Eponym: Bowerick Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged, spends his time (and he has an infinite amount of it) insulting every being in the Universe -- in alphabetical order. Analogy: Unlike Bowerick himself, this telescope will only insult you if you ask with a disparaging or incredulous tone "Uh, is that telescope homemade?" While we don't actually know who created him or how Wowbagger was made, we know that he provides views as beautiful as his own construction that make a mockery of assembly line productions, his size or larger. |
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Fenchurch
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Make & Model: Televue NP101
Design / Mount: Apochromatic refractor on CG-5 go-to equatorial mount Aperture: 4" Focal length: 540mm Usable Magnification Range: 15-100x Optimal Targets: Bright planets, big nebulae, open star clusters, asterisms, double stars, and our Moon H2G2 Eponym: As a young lady, Fenchurch figured out how "the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work! And no one would have to get nailed to anything." But seconds later, before she could share her epiphany, the Vogons destroyed Earth, and of course her. Fenchurch never seems to let a little thing like non-existence slow her down though! Later she teaches Arthur to fly- "the knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." The missing has to be accidental, not intentional, and facilitated by a sudden distraction, consequently few people fly. Scholars of Douglas Adams (yes, we such people exist) speculate that Fenchurch embodies his concept of dreaming -- both the literal and figurative dreaming: desiring the Universe to be a better place, the ability to fly, and the impossible return of lost love, as tortures us when we are trying to sleep. Certainly Fenchurch is the woman Arthur periodically ends up with, when she's not unexpectedly and inconveniently disappearing. Analogy: Unlike "The Hubble" and other space telescopes, our Fenchurch does NOT fly (i.e. orbit Earth), and we would never throw her at the ground in hopes of missing. Nevertheless, because she is exceedingly portable for a professional telescope, she is the refractor all astronomers dream of working with. We intentionally avoid saying we "own" Fenchurch because that always seems to be the mistake of complacency that Arthur makes right before the love of his life vanishes yet again. |
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Zaphod
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Make & Model: Celestron C-6 & Explore Scientific AR-102 Rental Cost: $31/night
Design / Mount: Double-scope on Twlight II mount "dumb scope" Aperture: 6" & 4" Focal length: 1500 mm & 663mm Usable Magnification Range: 35-175x, 16-80x Optimal Targets: Bright planets, big nebulae, open star clusters, asterisms, double stars, and our Moon H2G2 Eponym: "Zaphod is just zis guy you know..." with 2 heads and 3 arms. He's a narcissistic, impulsive, hippie-cad of an adventurer; but otherwise a universally likeable guy. Zaphod became the Galactic President so he could steal the Heart of Gold at her dedication. With that ultimate spaceship he could have become the ultimate playboy, but instead, and perhaps partly out of boredom, he chose to chauffeur Ford, Arthur, and Trillian about on their adventures. Analogy: Zaphod is the Dark Ranger's "travel scope." Most of the DRTT scopes travel, but only Zaphod has spent time in the bilge of whitewater rafts and the baggage compartment of airplanes. His double-headedness is not just bizarre, it's also highly functional. When working a big crowd, he can handle two lines of stargazers simultaneously, offering similar but not identical views. We often configure him for simultaneous high power and low power views of the same object, which not surprisingly causes people to get in line twice. So, much like his eponym, Zaphod is not nearly as practical or efficient as one may hope, but is always entertaining! |
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The Point of View Gun
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Make & Model: Russian-made ??
Design / Mount: Truss-tube refractor on a wooden equatorial mount Aperture: 4" Focal length: 600mm Usable Magnification Range: 15-100x Optimal Targets: Bright planets, big nebulae, open star clusters, asterisms, double stars, and our Moon H2G2 Eponym: Perhaps one of Douglas Adam's most beautiful inventions, the POV Gun was designed to zap males with a sudden jolt of empathy. It was made by Deep Thought as commissioned by an intergalactic consortium of angry housewives who were tired of ending every argument with their husbands with the phrase "You just don't get it, do you?" Analogy: Sadly, we don't use this telescope very much. Hopefully it's not because the Dark Rangers® are mostly men, though that's something we try to over-compensate for. Indeed, we make an extra effort to try and make astronomy fun and interesting to women and girls, not because we are creepy, but because we know the history of our science better than most astronomers do. We know that many of the extremely great discoveries were made by women, ironically the extremely under-represented gender in astronomy. The women in our lives will tell you we don't listen when we should, we try to help when we should have just listened, etc. We need to be zapped by the POV gun just as often as the next guy. But one thing we absolutely get is that if we had more female minds in astronomy, we, as a profession and as a civilization, would undoubtedly understand the Universe better than we do now. |
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Rob Mckenna
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Make & Model: Lunt LS60THA (H-alpha)
Design / Mount: Solar scope can be directly mounted but often rides piggyback on one of the 11" robotic scopes to compare white-light solar filters (good for seeing sunspots) with H-alpha ability to detect undulating texture of our Sun and prominences (aka "solar flares". Aperture: 4" Focal length: 500mm Usable Magnification Range: 10-50x Optimal Target: Our Sun, and nothing else H2G2 Eponym: Rob McKenna "is a miserable bastard" who also happens to be a rain god. It rains everywhere he goes and though his primary occupation is to be a lorry driver, he makes a lot of money from vacation destinations who pay him to NOT make deliveries to their locations. Analogy: The over-used joke among telescope owners is that if you want to make it a rain, set up a telescope. Here, ♫ "home, home on the range," ♫ our nights are usually ♫ "not cloudy all [night]" ♫, BUT our summer afternoons often do cloud up. This makes solar observing challenging in Southern Utah, as does the fact that most of us Dark Rangers also have day-jobs, (It's a seasonal tourism economy, pretty much everybody works at least 2 jobs). Afternoon clouds also lead to our anxious guests calling to ask why we haven't called them to cancel yet? The answer is simple: we don't call when we aren't cancelling. Which is to say when you don't hear from us, that means "We are a go!" If you do make the mistake of calling to alert us that you saw some afternoon clouds, we will try to swear at you far less then Rob would. :-) |
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? Make & Model: (2) Lunt LS60s (H-alpha & Calcium-K)
Design / Mount: Double-headed solar scope Aperture: 4" Focal length: 500mm Usable Magnification Range: 12-50x Optimal Target: Our Sun and nothing else H2G2 Eponym: ? Analogy: ? |
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