Optics and other things

My dad gave me his old birding telescope which he must have bought in the sixties sometime. He says it is no way near as good as his new one but I took my daughter to the Coastguard Station last night and we looked at the ships travelling up and down the Mersey and even on the lowest magnification (25x) I could read the names on all but the smallest vessels. Just for the record we saw Plover Arrow, Superseacat three and Dominique Trader along with the Liverpool Pilot boat and a Trawler which was just too far away to read the name. I felt like that old bloke in the picture of the Boyhood of Raleigh though my daughter was really more interested in making sandcastles. She did keep coming to look at each ship through the telescope though.