Teeter's Telescopes Suspends Production
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- Designer and manufacturer of custom made Dobsonian telescopes suspends production beginning after their September 2019 Production Run. Nearly 18 years in business, they have produced 300 one-of-a-kind telescopes in use by amateur astronomers throughout the USA and even abroad into Europe and Asia. Teeter's Telescopes owner, Rob Teeter, discusses his decision to halt production and regroup. Stay tuned for future updates.
Dear Mr. Teeter, As you said in the video, I'd love for you to do a video explaining your views on where the Dobsonian telescope industry is going. Thanks.
Yes! I would be fascinated!
Maybe! My time right now at this point is best spent in the workshop making progress on our backlog of orders. So perhaps when I clear most of that work out of here I'll sit down and do some more of these videos. Thanks for your interest!
@@Aubstract Thanks for your interest! It is so noted.
Best of luck, Mr. Teeter. I've always dreamed of getting one of your scopes. Perhaps scale back to a dozen scopes per year, and then raise prices a bit, turning your company into the Rolls Royce of astronomy? Just a thought. Take care!
Thanks Raj! We'll see what the future holds. Lots yet to be determined.
Please come back! I moved to Tucson for the night sky, and just found out about you and your rep. Please come back! You're a legend in Tucson astronomy circles. Anywho, good luck my friend!
You mentioned using a portable planetarium as an alternate business. I’d like to know more about this venture. I have been considering doing the same in NE Indiana. Clear skies! 🌃
Jim, you should contact my business associate John Miller at Pearl Observatory. He is interested in selling Pearl Observatory franchises (traveling science education, including planetarium shows) in various parts of the US. You can reach him by going through the Pearl Observatory website: www.PearlObservatory.com
It is a great pity that scope building doesn't pay enough. You said that the telescope market does not support increasing the price but if you were able to increase the price to what would pay then that would reduce orders and yet give you more money per order. Just a thought. I live in Scotland. Not sure I'll ever be able to buy one of your amazing scopes but I live in hope. I know that the shipping costs to the UK would be very high.
I’m glad I got to meet you and see your telescopes in person at NEAF 2018. Those are some of the finest pieces of equipment I’ve ever seen built. I can understand the business side of it where you need to step back and assess where it’s at. Good luck to you and hopefully can work it out again, Donnie.
Thanks Donnie! We'll see what the future holds. Still much to be determined.
I would love to hear your thoughts on where the Dobsonian telescope making business is going that you mentioned in the video. I'm 60 years old and have seen the Dobsonian Telescope making go from being an amateur hobby started by John Dobson himself to become a business starting with Obsession Telescopes starting in 1989. My hope is that Dobsonian telescope making starts being more of an amateur hobby again and telescope making and mirror making is taught more in schools, so young people can actually make a telescope themselves as I did when I was 14 all from a single book by Sam Brown "All About Telescopes". It really made me think and gave me a great sense of pride when I finally finished it. I still have that telescope today after 46 years and it still works as well as it did when I built it. Where do you think the Dobsonian telescope making business is going? I'm hoping you can find a few minutes in your busy schedule to do a quick video about it.
Thanks Jeff! Hopefully after I've gotten much of my current backlog of telescope orders completed and shipped/delivered to our customers I can make more videos. But right now my time is best spent in the workshop building telescopes, not necessarily talking about them. :-)
Dear Rob Teeter, have you thought about moving to an area of the country that is less expensive to live than New Jersey, like the southwest, Nevada perhaps?
Ah, if only! Perhaps if I weren't married, perhaps if we didn't have children on the way, perhaps if all of my family (and my wife's family) weren't all on the East Coast then I might have considered going westward. But my wife has made the point in the rare instances when we have talked about moving somewhere more affordable...if you move somewhere less expensive to live you also run the risk of making less money in that area. In the long run - as painful as it is to pay $12K+ in property taxes per year, we do stand to actually earn more money here in New Jersey than we do anywhere else in the country, based upon my wife's industry and my other non-telescope building endeavors. We'll appreciate this later in life when we do finally retire, sell our home in NJ and can take all of our Northeast money with us to somewhere further south and/or west and get way more bang for our buck. But for now, we need to take the good with the bad here in NJ, and we'll be glad we did later because we'll have earned much more here than elsewhere.
Sorry to hear the news. I hope you figure out a way to make it work out for you.
Thanks for the great work that you've been doing on these high quality telescopes and for the excellent videos that you've made on how to use and maintain them. I've wanted to buy a Teeter telescope, but where I live is intensely light polluted for 60 miles around, back yards are small, and backyard observing is out of the question. I firmly believe that your business would have reached a much larger scale, covering the fixed costs of production and design, were it not for the light pollution problem, for that really goes against owning larger scopes and maybe any scope. I think that the first and final place for a Dobsonian telescope is your backyard--more quality observing time, less time-consuming transport and no heavy lifting that goes with the transport. Thank you again.
James Adams, Sorry for the long delay in replying. You make a very good point about the growing light pollution problem in the world, but especially in the USA where more and more people leaving lights on all night long has become a growing problem. Now, I very seldom go out viewing because even the lights in my small town have gotten brighter and brighter over the past 13 years since we moved here. And the dark skies here was a major reason we moved here. I now would rather stay inside and go to the Hubble telescope website and look up deep sky objects there and look at their absolutely incredible pictures. Growing light pollution is really is a very sad state of modern day life. More laws need to be implemented to save the night sky from light pollution.
@@Jeff-wb3hh Hi Jeff. I know what you mean and it could be better. The problem is that there are too many streetlights and the ones we have are the wrong type--globe lights that destroy the view. I think this can solved, but some changes would be needed: (1) educate people (IDA); (2) replace globe lights with hooded lights; (3) reduce the number of street lights. I understand that the UK has been working on changing the type of light, from globe to hooded. Maybe we could do this too. If so, that would allow fans of the night sky to view from their back yard. For myself, I prefer that--not interested in lugging a lot of equipment around for 50 miles each way.
Thanks James! We have many customers who use their TeeterScopes in their light polluted backyards. Aperture is still aperture, resolution is still resolution, the bigger the scope the more you see. We can't all live in Utah or Colorado, so we have to use what we've got. :-)
In fact, I feel it's better to observe in light polluted skies than to lament the light pollution and not observe at all.