The author of the article is Alexey Petsyk, an astronomy lover from Moscow.
The material was published on the website star-hunter.ru at the personal request of the author of the article.
All rights to text and illustrations belong to Alexey Petsyk.
The author of the translation into English is Ruslan Ilnitsky
Translator’s note is in italics.

Perfect is the worst enemy of Good Enough!

But if we pick up … a telescope and look at the sky
with an assisted sight, we will see two stars,
three stars, four stars …
Best of all, of course, five stars!

Chapter 1

Small school refractor

Small School Refractor (MShR) RTM-60 – modifications

After completing work on the history of the School meniscus telescopes of the USSR, somehow it turned out by itself that I was interested in school refractors of which in the USSR, as everyone knows, 2 types were produced – Large Small school refractor (Bol’shoy Shkol’nyy Refraktor  – BShR) and Small School Refractor (Malyy Shkol’nyy Refraktor – MShR).
It would seem that there is not much to collect here – well, there are two – but this turned out to be true only at first glance. Having dealt with the topic more closely, I found out that the MShR was produced in at least 6 modifications (and the BShR – probably more, until I counted seven), and the development did not go as expected “from simple to complex”, but for some reason the other way around, with what something with an increasing degree of simplification. This article is devoted to the description of the history of the release and “improvement” of the MShR.
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