Tonight’s meeting was called to order by Ian Hewitt. It was the first regular meeting in three months since the November and December meetings were cancelled due to the holidays. Ian introduced tonight’s speaker: Rob Teeter of Teeter’s Telescopes. Rob’s talk was titled “Teeter and his Telescopes.” Rob, who lives in New Jersey. told the Club about his career in telescoping building. Starting in 1998, he has built 72 scopes so far. His first scope was an 8″ f/6 Newtonian built when he was 15 years old. It was an award winner at Stellafane that year. His next scope was a 12.5″ Swayze truss Dob. It was completed after several false starts and 10 sheets of plywood. Rob told us that the key to making good scopes is having good tools.
Rob went into the telescoping making business in 2001, when he started Teeter’s Telescopes after attending community college. His first commercial scope was an 8″ f/8 in Sept. 2002. He has had a queue of scopes to build for customers ever since that time. No two have been alike since they are often custom made to customer specifications.
Rob spent a lot of his talk telling us of his memorable customer stories. His first story was about the scope built for Tom Trusock of Cloudy Night Reviews. Tom gave a very favorable review which generated lots of good comments among potential customers. That particular scope shows up on Astromart about every two years which is a good thing. Rob told us about his signature scope “the Cherry Scope”. It has the distinctive cherry red woodwork which sets Rob’s scopes apart from other manufacturers. 49 of his 54 scopes have had this finish.
Rob closed shop in 2006 to get a “real job,” but within two years a customer begged him to build a scope for him which started the telescope building off again. He told of one customer who lived in South Korea who spent over $1000 to get a Teeter scope shipped to him. Rob’s final story was about a particular customer who was very fussy about the dimensions of his scope and would not ship the mirror to Rob to get his scope properly built. After much give and take and many rebuilds, he shipped this scope to the customer who was happy with it. After the talk, Rob spent about 15-20 minutes answering questions from the audience. A crowd of over 50 people showed up to hear his talk.
In the business part of the meeting, Ian mentioned that there was a recent officer’s meeting and the notes would be posted online soon. The Club is now accepting Key Committee requests at the present time. Applications should be submitted by the next indoor meeting. The upcoming year’s calendar was discussed since the indoor and outdoor meetings have been switched due to the moon phases. Ian reminded everyone that Astronomy Days is May 21 and 22 this year instead of the usual mid to late January timeframe. The Museum is sponsoring a Sun-Earth day this year in March and would like the club to help out with some solar observing.