A Glimpse into the Heavens

I recently read an article indicating that a class action lawsuit, filed by a big law firm with four names, accuses two telescope manufacturers of price fixing. According to the suit even though the companies enjoyed a 80% market share in the United States, they collaborated on a scheme to determine which products each company would manufacture and what price they would charge. The companies allegedly conspired to monopolize the consumer telescope market. The litigation affects at least a quarter of a million people. If true we've reached a new low as price gouging has finally found its way to astronomy.

Plaintiff Mr. I. Baban of Quebec bought a telescope for his son in 2016. He paid $68.97 for a FirstScope made by Celestron. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Baban paid an artificially inflated price through the defendants's anticompetitive conduct.

The problem that I have with all of this is that in 1977, after saving the money I earned from my paper route for an entire year, I purchased a telescope from the Sears Catalog for $59.99. Forty years later, telescopes went up in price by $9 dollars. Adjusting for inflation $60 in 1977 is worth $236.63 in 2016. Sounds like to me that Mr. Baban got a bargain.

This got me thinking about the telescope I had as a kid.

Not only did my telescope cost a quantum load more than Baban's it took five months to arrive by mail. Back then ordering from the Sears Catalog was like registering for a surprise. Most things took so long to come in that you often forgot you purchased something in the first place. When the package showed up, it was a complete shock.

My mother used to order everything from the Sears Catalog. When I went from a crib to a bed, the pillow my mother ordered took half a year to arrive. I slept without a pillow for so long that decades later I still wake with my head resting on the mattress.

Once she bought me dress shoes that took eight months to arrive. By then my feet grew well beyond her estimate. I still recall my mother jamming my foot into the shoe while insisting that they fit perfectly. Returning items back to Sears took longer than when they initially arrived, and more often than not, they wouldn't accept the return. My mother never sent anything back. She insisted I wear the shoes for my First Communion. After I hobbled up to the alter to receive communion then returned to the pew, Sister Ann asked me if I had to use the bathroom because I was "walking so awkward." Thanks to the Sears Catalog the first time I received the Sacrament of Holy Communion, I looked like I had to take a dump.

Most people think that the reason it took so long for our stuff we ordered by mail to arrive back then was because there were no computers, but that's not true. Computers had nothing to do with it. In the 70's the experience of consumers ordering from catalogs was so abysmal that workers had to try not to exceed our expectations. Back in the day Sears employees would leave orders for some crap at their desk for weeks. There was no incentive to clear one's inbox by the end of the day. Workers lived up to the lowest expectations because they could, not because they were incapable of processing paperwork more quickly. In the 70's we all accepted that no one gave a shit.

Not only did products ordered from Sears take months to arrive, often they reached us in an unusable state. When my telescope finally showed up, I was so excited that I assembled it straight away. After carefully following each step of the instructions, I inserted an eyepiece and looked through the scope. All I saw was a black circle. I checked the troubleshooting guide which advised me to remove the lens cap. The cap was still in the box. I checked that nothing was blocking the tube. My mother called Sears to ask them what we should do. She spoke to a guy named Ted, who informed her that,

"Telescopes are used to look at things in space, not things on earth."

My mother insisted that was the problem. My telescope could magnify the moon, but not a tree. I thought that this theory was insane, but I wanted it to be true because I knew sending my telescope back to Sears would mean I had to wait nearly another year before I could pursue the heavens. I tried lining up the moon that night but to no avail. In the end Sears took back my telescope, and after waiting months, they informed me that the model was back ordered. It final arrived two years later.

I used my telescope all through middle school. I saw the crater, Copernicus, on the moon as well as the rings of Saturn and four moons of Jupiter all with my telescope. I spent hours outside at night looking for difficult to see objects like Neptune and Pluto. My telescope wasn't powerful enough to find such faint heavenly bodies, but that didn't stop me from searching. I liked being out late into the night because it was dark, quiet, and most importantly, solitary.

Whenever I went out shortly after sunset to look at Venus, Mars or the moon, inevitably someone would stroll outside and want to take a look for themselves. Now fixed scopes like mine lacked a motor drive so you have to line up an object then watch it traverse the field. Locating something then lining it up was a cumbersome task especially under high magnification. After targeting an object, the first thing someone would always do, no matter how many times I warned them, is grab the eyepiece with their dominate hand then stick their eye up to the orifice. Touching a telescope, even minutely, knocks the target out of field. My father eventually learned this one restriction and enjoyed watching the moon drift by. I even got him interested in looking at maps of the moon to locate features with the telescope.

My oldest sister came outside once in response to my dad's detailed description of the lunar mountain range he found. She was a product of the 70's, smoking Kool cigarettes because they had the most tar. Sarcasm to her was a dialect. Unreasonableness, a way of life. She once elected not to swim in the ocean because “there’s fish in it.” When traveling by car she refused to go anywhere unless she got the front seat which allowed her access to the radio and the cigarette lighter. I lined up the quarter phase moon then told her not to touch the telescope. She watched the sattellite pass by, then scoffed,

"Hmmm."

And off she went back into her groovy, turn on, tune in, drop out world. Later after I counted over a hundred stars in the Pleiades asterism, I came in from the night. My father asked my sister,

"What did you think of the telescope?"

In the 70's we learned how to behave by watching sitcoms like Happy Days and Welcome Back Kotter. Most of the time the plots of these shows featured the cool kids ridiculing the less popular geeks. When the nerds did get revenge it usually involved insulting the alpha kids. Fonzie played by Henry Winkler would insult Potsie Weber or Ralph Malph with the often repeated comeback,

"Sit on it."

Vinnie Barbarineo played by John Travolta would tell Arnold Dingfelder Horshack,

"Up you nose with a rubber hose."

We'd laugh every time they'd repeat these signature snarky lines. Back then plots were all about being cool and not about being kind to your friends. So not surprisingly, a whole generation grew up incapable of saying anything positive.

My sister answered, "He doesn't give you enough time to look."

"You do know the moon is moving," I said.

She stared at me with a combined expression of disgust, displeasure and disbelief often employed when she was confused from both too little science and math in class and too much Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa and pot afterwards.

My interest in astronomy waned in high school as I moved to physics and eventually engineering. I hope that the telescope monopoly lawsuit is dismissed if a judge finds a lack of actual damages. Telescopes are certainly cheaper today as compared to when I was a kid. Demand is probably much lower as well. In the end, I can't help but think that this lawsuit is an effort by the cool kids to beat up on the nerds just one last time.