RIP Questar

[Richard Navarrete]

Closed doors on May 4. I looked through both the 3.5” and 7” models in the 90’s at Fremont Peak. Refractor like images in a beautiful and compact package.

Richard

Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS

[Mark Wagner]

Didn't Jay have some encounter with a Questar?

I've looked thru both as well.

[Peter Natscher]

Jack Seiders(?) had a Q7 that I looked through in 1995 set up in the Observatory side.

[Mark Wagner]

Zeiders.  Gone, recently.  SJAA president multiple times, big into old school astrophotography.

[Jamie Dillon, DDK]

At the Binge, I was telling David Kirjassoff about Jack Zeiders. What a good guy. Met him a couple of times, when I was a raw rookie, at the SW lot on the Peak. Once he took me on a tour across the summer sky from Cygnus over to Pegasus, pointing out the constellations, but also mentioning what snazzy objects were up there, including NGC's. Jack had the sky chart in his head.

[Jay Freeman]

> On May 6, 2026, at 13:28, Mark Wagner <itsmar...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Didn't Jay have some encounter with a Questar?

LOL, I think Mark knows me well enough to have realized that his comment would be clickbait. I have been known to say that there was nothing wrong with a Questar that couldn't be fixed with a hack saw, but that's not quite true: It had several problems which were beyond the reach of even more advanced implements of destruction.

I don't begrudge people the opportunity to acquire any astronomical equipment they like, and I commend the dedicated staff at Questar for continuing to provide as high a level of support and assistance as possible for Questar owners as the company entered an ever more difficult business position: Not being able to find suppliers of optics or of mechanical parts does put a damper in operations. I owned a Questar once (3.5-inch standard model, produced in 1967 or 1968). My father gave it to me as a commencement present when I received my baccalaureate in physics from CalTech in 1968.

I did not like the Questar 3.5: I considered it a shamefully poor design, nearly useless for any astronomical purpose. I found it to have poor optical performance, and to be overcompact, overweight, unmaintainable, and overpriced. Let's take those one at a time ...

Poor optical performance: It had a 1/3-diameter central obstruction. Even if the optical parts were perfectly figured (and Questar had a fine reputation in that respect), that central obstruction reduced the performance on low-contrast fine detail to the level of a good unobstructed 60 mm instrument. It isn't and wasn't hard to make a decent 60 mm long-focus achromat, which meant that a 60 mm beginner Tasco refractor would equal the performance of a Questar on difficult lunar or planetary detail. Furthermore, a 4.25-inch Newtonian gathered more light for deep-sky work.

Overcompact: The basic problem here -- and the reason I call the design shamefully poor -- was that the fork arms were too short. The telescope was okay when set flat on its base and not looking too far above the horizon, but as the user pointed it higher and higher, it became difficult to get the observer's eye to a position where he or she could see through the telescope. But consider set it up as an equatorial: There was the same problem getting to the eyepiece as declinations got close to the poles.That cute around-the-corner finder was blocked by the drive base when the observer pointed it lower than the celestial equator, or on rotating the optical tube assembly to try to get at the eyepiece. The telescope tube itself hit the drive base at about thirty or thirty-five degrees below the celestial equator -- that left a lot of sky unobservable for people in the southern parts of the United States. Questar could have fixed this problem simply by making the fork arms longer -- the proposed use of my hack saw was merely to cut pieces of aluminum extrusion to extend the existing fork arms, which were machine-screwed to the base of the fork, so the change would have been easy. With about a two-inch extension, the telescope would have swung through the fork entirely, which means that it could have been stored in that position in the same leather case that Questar provided. Note that subsequent manufacturers of compact fork-mounted Schmidt-Cassegrains -- such as Meade and Celestron -- did provide fork arms of much greater proportionate length.

Overweight: As aircraft designers say, "Weight makes weight", and extra mass affects the size, weight and cost of a tripod sufficient to support the Questar in the field. The problem was the drive base, which looked a little like an upside-down shiny aluminum flower pot. It was pretty and mades the Questar easy to work with on a tabletop, but it was thick-walled and mostly hollow -- all that was inside was a simple electric motor and a rather small gear set. You could have drilled a lot of big lightening holes in it and still preserved functionality, or perhaps Questar could have made the flower-pot removable, with something smaller, lighter and easily attached to a tripod inside it.

Unmaintainable: If it got out of collimation, you had to send it back to the factory to get it fixed. Mine started showing comatic flare of stars on axis after a while, and I decided the telescope wasn't worth the $100 to get it shipped (that was a lot of money for a graduate student in the 1970s). In fairness, Maksutovs are indeed difficult to collimate, but more recent makers seem to have done a good job at making instruments that do not get out of collimation in normal use, and at least one well-known brand (Intes) has full collimation adjustments accessible without disassembly.

Overpriced: If I recall correctly, when the Questar 3.5 was introduced in the 1950s it cost $795. At that time a six-inch equatorially-mounted Newtonian was running about $200, an excellent binocular could be had for $50, and beginner 60 mm Tasco refractors were at a similar price level. Give me a break.

Since my Questar was a special gift, I did not want to sell it, and I would have felt guilty foisting it off on any unsuspecting amateur astronomer. After a few years, I ended up giving it back to my father. I have never missed it.


-- Jay Reynolds Freeman, Deep-Sky Hack-Saw Wielder
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Jay_Reynol...@mac.com
http://JayReynoldsFreeman.com (personal web site)