Glenn Peters, manager of Orion Telescope Center in Cupertino, says business increases about 10 percent each year as more people want to see what all the fuss is about. And stargazing gets a boost in the valley, where telescopes at Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton served astronomers Geoff Marcy, Paul Butler and Debra Fischer in their recent discovery of planets outside our solar system. Now it s even easier for novices, with the development of computerized go-to systems that quickly find constellations and allow you to know with certainty that you are actually gazing at Pegasus in the northern sky.
Experts agree the best place to buy is from a store where telescopes are the major product line.
Never spend more than a third of the price of the telescope for any accessory. Greatly reduces the time it takes to find celestial constellations by using computers to locate the objects. The information you receive online from SV, the Magazine of the San Jose Mercury News and Mercury Center is protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The copyright laws prohibit any copying, redistributing, retransmitting, or repurposing of any copyright-protected material.