When businesses close, customers often fall into different camps with their reactions. Those who didn’t like them assume it was because of bad business decisions and enjoy the schadenfreude joy of another’s misfortunes. If they were casual customers, they might think, “what a shame”, and move on. If you were fans of the business, you might often feel a greater sense of discomfort.

But when that business is an astronomy store that claimed the title of the oldest telescope retailer in Canada, dating back to 1975 as the first authorized Meade dealer in Canada, it feels more like losing a friend.

I can’t claim that Focus Scientific was the source of my first scope, as that honour goes to Sears probably, with a small hand-held scope as a kid that didn’t seem to show anything different than I could see with my naked eye. I can’t even complain that it was a typical department store scope problem, not even at that level, because it didn’t even come with a tripod of any sort, it was just handheld.

Instead, I went to Focus Scientific much later in life when I was 45 years old. My mother had passed on leaving a bit of money to the family as an inheritance, and I used some of my share to buy a Celestron NexStar 8SE.… Read the rest