Paul Markov, "Star Hopping Primer," Small Tent, Saturday 2:30 p.m., a senior program manager at ATI Technologies Inc., who has attended every Starfest since 1984. Over the past 24 years he has star hopped to just over 1000 deep sky objects and catalogued each one of them. Other interests include CCD imaging and organizing Members' Night meetings for the Toronto Centre RASC.

Despite the growing popularity of computerized GOTO telescopes, low cost non-computerized telescopes (especially Dobsonians) are very common. In fact, a poll of 1108 people which ran on www.astrobuysell.com in 2003, indicated that 37% own a GOTO telescope, while 63% do not. This means that the majority of observers still point their telescopes manually and need to know how to star hop. In his presentation Paul will discuss the essentials of star hopping, such as sky atlases, finder scopes, wide-field eyepieces, field of view, inverted and reversed images, and star hopping techniques.