Celestron Memories

Celestron Memories...

It's not often that you get to work at what you enjoy doing as a hobby, and get paid well for it too. I was very fortunate to work as the Customer Services Manager at Celestron International, in Torrance, California from 1976 through 1979. Celestron was a well-run company and a great place to work. After all these years, I still consider my time at Celestron to be the best job I ever had.

Celestron was the largest and most respected maker of amateur telescopes in the world at that time, and while they still make fine telescopes, they have lost their market dominance in the years since then. When I was there, Tom Johnson still owned the company, and Alan Hale was the President (Alan is now a co-owner and CEO of the 'new' Celestron). Leo Henzl was briefly the V.P. of Marketing, and Gil Wood did the advertising. Bill Henshaw did the buying; Bill Gordon ran the shipping department, and Jim Cordray did the warranty and repair work. Altogether, there was about 105 full-time employees at that time.

These were the 'Orange' years -- Celestron's original line of heavy duty, blue and white SCT's were out of production. The Orange and Brown (later Gray) color scheme was 'in' and the C5, C8, and C14 were their principal products (the C11 wasn't introduced until a few years after the C14). Celestron was manufacturing their 5.5" and 8" Schmidt cameras then too, but those instruments were always relatively low volume units. If I recall correctly, Celestron was producing about 100 C8's, 20 C5's, and 6-8 C14's per week in the mid-to-late 70's.

I was involved in many different projects in addition to customer service activities. I had the opportunity to create many product publications - mostly Celestron's operating manuals and technical bulletins. Gil Wood wrote the first 'real' C5/C8 instruction manual, which had a black and white cover photo of a C8. Prior to that time, customers received about 10 mimeographed pages of instructions with their scopes. My first project was the C14 operating manual. I based it on Gil's C5/C8 work, but expanded it and added much more observing information. This manual included the very first published directions for the 'declination drift' method for accurate polar alignment (the technique had been described to me by astrophotographers Brad Wallis and Robert Provin) - which all manufacturers now include in their manuals. This C14 manual was also the first manual to feature a color cover: my own C14 superimposed a spectacular color photo of M51 that Leo had done with a C14 and 'cold camera' from Mt Pinos, California. After that, I followed the same general model and did manuals for the Celestron Schmidt Cameras, an expanded C5/C8 Manual, which this time featured a color cover with a C8 superimposed on another one of Leo's photos - M20, the Trifid Nebula - and finally one for the newly introduced C90 Maksutov. I also wrote instruction sheets for other products like the Celestron-Williams cold camera, Celestron binoculars, the Rich Field Adapter (RFA), as well as other service/maintenance instructions.

Another major project which several of us contributed to was the creation of Celestron's first really nice, color catalog. Since Questar's product catalog was always an object of our admiration, our 'unofficial' goal was to create a product catalog better than theirs - and I think we succeeded. Gil Wood wrote the majority of the copy; Leo Henzl did most of the photos - both of the products and through them - his astrophotos were some of the best astrophotos made in the 70's; I did a few of the astrophotos and some regular telephoto shots, as well as some editing and writing (more on subsequent revisions of the catalog). And of course, Alan and TJ provided general guidance and had the final say and approval for all we did.

Celestron catalog - 1978 Me with 1250 telephoto Wendie & C90 (left) Me & C14 (rt)

As far as I know, there are only a few 'historical archives' on the Web of Celestron's early years. Rod Mollise's web site (and book, 'Choosing and Using a Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope') contains a nice history of the development of the Schmidt Cassegrain telescope (SCT) - in the form of a 'Used SCT Buyers Guide'. More recently, Robert Piekiel of Marcellus, N.Y. has published a very nice account entitled 'Celestron - the Early Years' which he is distributing on CD ROM. It is very well done and contains a lot of pictures and documents from those early years. Do a search for 'Robert Piekiel' on AstroMart to find it. I highly recommend you check out both of these publications if you're at all interested in the history of commercial SCT's.