A week ago Lynch headed off to the radio station after observing the night before with his 14½-inch Starmaster Dobsonian. He'd set it up on his back porch and, too tired to drag it back inside, wrapped up the session by slewing the tube down to horizontal, covering it, and placing a towel over the eyepiece hole to prevent dew buildup. Pretty much standard operating procedure, right?

Well, later that morning, Lynch got a frantic call from his wife. "The telescope just blew up, and the deck's on fire," she exclaimed. Lynch rushed home in a panic, only to find the scope pointing skyward and nothing left of the secondary cage but a charred skeleton.

It didn't take him long to figure out what had happened.

A freak alignment with the Sun caused the telescope's secondary cage to erupt in flames, leaving nothing but these charred remains.

"The wind blew the cover off," he explains. "The scope was locked horizontally but the wind blew it out of gear and lifted it skyward — toward the southeast, unfortunately! Later that the morning the Sun just happened to pass in front of the mirror. What are the chances of that! When that happened, all hell broke loose: the eyepiece mount cap caught fire, and soon the entire upper half of the scope exploded in flame. The hand controller, eyepiece mount, and Telrad finder totally disintegrated!"

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