OK, here’s 10 quick gifts that cost less than $10, can ship easy (weigh less than a pound) and are great as stocking stuffers or gifts for people on a budget. Let’s go!
Comes with 104 pieces that allow you to construct a maze of straws that makes drinking your favorite beverage a whole new world.
We finally have them in stock, the Dino Pet! The glowing, living dino-shaped pet!
The holidays mean less time for blog posts and more people looking into buying their first telescope. With this in mind we are reprinting our telescope buyer’s guide for the season:
Spectrum Scientifics Telescope Buyers Guide
There are several telescope buyers guides available on the Internet, some good, some not so good. At Spectrum we are writing from our experience with customers and hope to make this simple and helpful.
Towards that end, the first and in some ways only rule of telescopes is:
Aperture is King!
Aperture is the diameter of the main lens or mirror of the telescope. The bigger it is, the more light the telescope gathers. Do not judge a telescope by its magnification, and stay away from any brand of telescope that sells itself on excess magnification claims (300x!, 600x!, etc.). This is sure sign of poor quality.
More light gathering means better, brighter images, assuming all other things being equal. Decent commercially sold telescopes usually start about 60mm in size (about 2.3”) and go to 20” diameter or more. Roughly speaking, every 2 extra inches of aperture doubles the light gathering capacity of the telescope.
The big problem with getting more aperture is that it increases the size and weight of the telescope. Having a huge, giant telescope with lots of light gathering power has little benefit if it is so heavy you never want to take it out and use it! A minor, but critical caveat to the ‘Aperture is King’ rule is that the small, portable telescope that gets used all the time is more powerful than the giant telescope that never gets moved out of the garage.
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