[SJAAboard] Loaner program discussion (was: Agenda for board meeting)

[phil]

On the loaner program.

I agree with Rich and Your position that each scope needs to be looked  
at individually.

I will say, for my part, that I have found that while "Dobs for  
beginners" is not "wrong" it at least is not the whole story.   My  
experience is as a moderator with a group started to help beginners  
with (then) new cheap goto scopes (the Nexstar series).    It grew  
from about 20 of us in 1999 to over 6000 today.

What I see is people that start with dobs or newts on GEMs work very  
hard to find their first 10 objects and many of them give up or move  
to something else.    The "cheap goto" crowd has a learning curve to  
set up the scope and align it but once it starts working, they are  
fascinated and become real advocates with many moving on to other  
larger scopes.     Also "wide field" refractors fall into this  
category.   Even on alt/az mounts, with a decent skymap, they are very  
satisfying very quickly because they point intuitively and give early  
results rather quickly due to the wide fields.

Now the two things I mentioned above are results oriented which fits  
in with current society, like it or not.

And speaking of skymaps, my choice of a map to loan to new budding  
astronomers would be the Orion Deepmap 600.    Hands down for new  
folks in the hobby, it cant be beat.    Shows the relationships of all  
of the objects, easy to use, coated paper, single page, what more  
could you want.     If someone is too advanced for the DM600, then  
they probably have their own atlases.

My 2 cents.

Phil

On Jun 20, 2008, at 7:02 PM, Rob Hawley (SJAA) wrote:

> My own list has a slightly different motivation then others.  I am  
> not as
> convinced as others that the program as currently structured is  
> flawed.  The
> program has worked for many years. Anyone that does not want to  
> store a scope
> returns it. The other members are happy to contribute to the club.   
> The present
> method neither requires expensive storage nor places a further  
> burden on those
> running the club.  While from the outside it looks messy, it does  
> work and
> allows us to maintain a larger and more varied inventory.
>
> When I look at the inventory what I still see is a program that grew  
> by
> accreting other's cast offs.  Over the past year we have shown we  
> are willing to
> get rid of the scopes that are just not working.  I believe there  
> are still a
> number of scopes that do not belong in the program either because  
> they are
> unlikely to be used or will disappoint the loanee.  I also believe  
> the program
> has some holes that need we need to fill to make it well reasoned  
> program.
>
> Those discussions will be more difficult. While Gary's goals fulfill  
> a missing
> external statement of what the program's goals are, they do not  
> answer questions
> such as whether we should eliminate scopes that require AC power. I  
> agree with
> Rich that in the end we will simply have to look at each scope  
> individually.
>
>
> Rob Hawley
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Craig Scull [mailto:craigus at rocketmail.com]
>> Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 6:23 PM
>> To: Business list for SJAA board of directors
>> Subject: Re: [SJAAboard] Agenda for board meeting
>>
>> In discussion with others off-list I had a flash of insight I  
>> wanted to share
>> with the broader group with regard to loaner program inventory  
>> reduction.
>>
>> My first emotion to many of these is "no! don't let it go! that's a
>> great scope!" -- but then I realize that it doesn't make sense to  
>> store
>> scopes that don't get used because we are just sequestering them away
>> from the people who could actually use them. The "auction" is in some
>> cases a better match-making venue than the loaner program.
>>
>> That is all,
>> Craig
>
>
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