Speaking to their durability, a family friend gave his childhood Astroscan to our son for his fifth birthday. Our son is an adult now, and we still enjoy using it at home and on trips.
Dan Rutter has a nice Astroscan review that includes some other telescope suggestions:
http://www.dansdata.com/astros...
-Dangle
This phenomenon also seems to occur in the darkness of caves as well.
“Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.”
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Exactly. For a while I was "going for it" to see how far I could rise in academics. I used to joke that I had risen from street thug to one of the guys that gets to sit at the bar in the local don's place. But I always added the caveat "at least I don't have to kill anyone or worry about being killed."
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman