Hi Friend

I have  been selling telescopes from the same area close to Yorkdale Mall for close to 40 years. In that time, I’ve watched the night sky over Toronto go from “pretty good for a city” to something that barely qualifies as a sky at all.
 

If you bought a telescope five or ten years ago and find yourself using it less and less, I want you to know something: the problem probably isn’t you.
 

The GTA is now solidly Bortle 7 to 8. For those unfamiliar with the Bortle scale, that means on a clear night you can see the Moon, the planets, and maybe a handful of the brightest stars. The Milky Way? Forget it. That faint galaxy you used to tease out with averted vision? Gone under the glow.
 

Here’s what I hear almost every week from customers who come into the shop: “I spent $2,000 on a really nice setup and I haven’t touched it in two years.” They feel guilty about it. They think they lost interest, or they weren’t dedicated enough, or they just weren’t cut out for the hobby.
 

That’s not what happened. What happened is the sky above their house changed faster than their equipment could keep up.

Add in the setup friction — dragging out the mount, polar aligning, dealing with dew, waiting for cool-down — and you’ve got a hobby that now demands two hours of work for twenty minutes of mediocre viewing. On a weeknight in February, that’s a hard sell, even if you love the stars.
 

I’m not writing this to make you feel bad about gear that’s sitting unused. I’m writing because the hobby has changed more in the last three years than it did in the previous thirty. There are real solutions now for the exact problems I just described — solutions that didn’t exist when most of us bought our current equipment.

I’ll get into the specifics in next week’s email. For now, I just want you to stop blaming yourself. The sky moved. The technology moved. It’s okay if your approach needs to move too.

Clear skies,
 

Ray Khan

Khan Scope Centre

3243 Dufferin Street, Toronto

khanscope.com