The Man Who Invented the Astronomer’s Flashlight

Somewhere in your eyepiece case, or in a drawer from your last star party, there is probably a small red flashlight. Maybe it carries a big telescope brand’s name. Maybe it’s an import with no name at all. Whatever the label, the thing itself — a dim, adjustable red light an astronomer can read a chart by without wrecking half an hour of dark adaptation — was invented by one person: an astronomer named Leon Palmer, in 1984, because his flashlight kept dying at three in the morning.

I found this out by accident. I emailed Rigel Systems to ask permission to use their product photos in our red flashlight guide, and Dr. Palmer wrote back the same afternoon — first with the permission, then with a correction to something we’d printed, and then, over several long emails, with four decades of history that as far as I can tell has never been told in one place. This page is that story, in his words wherever possible. It’s worth knowing where the gear in your case actually comes from — and it’s a preview of something we want to do more of, because amateur astronomy was largely built by companies this size, run from houses, and most of their stories are quietly disappearing.

The flashlight that kept dying

Palmer’s credentials run deep on both sides of the amateur/professional line: a 1980 astronomy PhD from Ohio State, then a 40-year aerospace career on advanced space systems — including ground-processing software for the Hubble Space Telescope. But the Starlite was born earlier, at the eyepiece. His dissertation work was photometry on stars in globular clusters he had photographed — painstaking calibration at the telescope, at night, dial by dial. The observing light of the era was a rechargeable Sanyo “pilot” flashlight with a red side and a white side, and his kept running out of power in the small hours. “It ran out of power repeatedly at 3am,” he told me, “making it hard to read the dials on the telescope!”

Red LEDs were new then, and the do-it-yourself fix in astronomy circles was crude: an empty flashlight-bulb base with an LED soldered in, no regulation at all, dimming as the battery sagged. Palmer designed something better — a two-transistor regulator that held the LED’s brightness steady as the battery aged, behind a thumbwheel that could take the red down to almost nothing. That circuit became the first Starlite, the light he and his wife Linda founded Rigel Systems around in 1984 — and versions of it are still inside every light Rigel builds. “Good enough for our niche,” he says of it, forty years on.

The astronomer’s red flashlight was invented because one astronomer’s flashlight kept dying at 3am.

A warehouse full of recalled flashlights

The early Starlite spread by word of mouth and small ads, but Palmer’s favorite chapter from those years is about finding a cosmetically acceptable case to enclose the electronics — the step that would carry the Starlite fully into the commercial marketplace. (“Packaging,” he notes, “is always harder than function!”) Two large corporations — he declines to name them; one made power tools, the other chemicals — had teamed up on a consumer flashlight to launch the chemical company’s new lithium batteries. The flashlight reached stores and was promptly recalled: the batteries’ internal impedance was too high to drive an incandescent bulb. A recalled flashlight, though, is a perfectly good flashlight body — especially if you’re about to replace the bulb with LEDs that sip current. Palmer talked his way to the warehouse holding the recalled stock and started buying them in thousand-piece lots.

“There are two morals to this story,” he says. “One man’s lemon is another man’s lemonade — and big corporations can be friendly and helpful even to small guys.” He still has about five thousand of the original light bulbs in his garage. When sales approached a thousand units a year, Rigel invested in its own injection mold, and the Starlite got the body it still has.

1994: the big-brand deal — and the clone

If you owned a red astronomy light in the late ’90s, there’s a good chance it carried the name of one of the biggest brands in the telescope business — a brand we’ll leave unnamed here, though anyone who owned the classic flat square red light can probably work it out. By Palmer’s account, that light began as his: in 1994 Rigel supplied the Starlite to the brand to sell under its own name, and it sold well. What happened next is a story a lot of small American manufacturers will recognize. Palmer says the brand’s then-CEO pressed him to get his price down to $8 a unit — the price a Chinese factory had quoted for a copy. “Turned him down with: sorry, I have family to support!” The production moved to China without him, and about a year later, he says, a second major astronomy retailer dropped Rigel for the clone as well.

Palmer’s critique of the early clones is an engineer’s, not a bitter one — he rattles off the details the copyists missed. His potentiometer used a deliberately non-linear taper matched to how LEDs actually respond, so the thumbwheel dimmed evenly; the clone, he says, installed its taper backwards. His circuit board was slightly trapezoidal to set the thumbwheel at the right height. He sourced LEDs for uniform emission rather than a “pointy” hot spot, and used a polycarbonate lens where the early clones glued in glass that broke. He is careful to add that over the decades the manufacturers “probably” fixed some of it — and our own flashlight guide still recommends the current descendant of that design as a fine budget light. But the original was Rigel’s, and hardly anyone who owns one knows it.

One more detail from that era, told with a certain satisfaction: years after production moved overseas, Palmer noticed the brand’s version still wore its “Made in USA” sticker. He emailed them. They fixed the sticker.

“Turned him down with: sorry, I have family to support!”

1996: the white LED changes everything

In 1996 the Japanese firm Nichia produced the first white LED, and Palmer — who had been expecting it — moved fast: he added a second pair of LED sockets and a switch to the Starlite and introduced the Skylite, switchable between red and white. That two-word product naming — Starlite for one color, Skylite for two — survives on every light Rigel sells today.

The white LED also ended Rigel’s quiet years as the only LED flashlight maker that mattered. “All the big guys jumped into the LED flashlight business! It was a wild west thereafter,” Palmer says. The wild west included patent lawyers. Starting in 2001, he got the first of several calls from companies being sued over LED-flashlight patents filed around 2000 — patents on an idea Rigel had been shipping since 1984. Palmer supplied prior art each time: old circuit boards with copyright dates, pages from a 1970s CMOS Cookbook. One defendant settled anyway as the cheaper option; a later one fought and won with his material. The lawyers billing by the hour, he notes, never paid him a dime for any of it.

The QuikFinder: shrinking the Telrad

Rigel’s other famous product answers a question a lot of observers have asked while unscrewing a Telrad from a small telescope: why is this thing so big? Palmer’s answer is that the Telrad — a wonderful invention he clearly respects — was designed around an incandescent bulb and big D-cell batteries, and most of its housing is empty space. After its inventor, Steve Kufeld, died, the people who took the design over simply kept the existing molds running. So Palmer built the reflex finder the LED era allowed: the QuikFinder, a projected two-circle reticle in a housing a fraction of the Telrad’s size. He worked through a series of hand-built prototypes — the gray plastic one, he says, was “sorta the final prototype” — and when it sold well enough, went hunting for an affordable injection mold. “The rest is history.” It’s the “Best compact” pick in our telescope finder guide today.

Rigel Systems in 2026: two people, one house

Today Rigel Systems is Palmer and Linda, working from their house — she runs the business end, they both assemble, he designs. “It is a busy household.” It’s their retirement business now: a little extra income, a reason to stay sharp, and a stream of conversations with people who care about the same things. He collaborates with other small operations the same way — for his focus motors he’s worked for over fifteen years with a circuit-board and software partner he has never met in person.

He has advice for anyone planning to “start a business when I retire,” and it’s blunt: too late. “It takes at least 5 years to get up and running — one needs to start before retiring.”

Every light is still assembled in the USA — Palmer is precise about the word: “Yes we ‘assemble’ our products in USA — but components come from all over the globe!” — and built to order, in your choice of LED colors, from deep red to infrared. You can buy direct from Rigel, though Palmer himself points buyers to the specialist dealers Agena Astro, High Point Scientific, and Astronomics. Our flashlight guide has the full rundown of the current models.

What forty years at the eyepiece taught him

Alongside Rigel and the aerospace career, Palmer taught astronomy at El Camino College for 39 years — and he still writes observing-technique explainers for ScopeTrader. His answer to “what do you wish every first-time telescope owner knew” doesn’t mention telescopes at all: take a pair of binoculars to a dark site and look up. It’s how he showed Linda the Milky Way for the first time, back when they were dating. “There’s lots one can see with binoculars, and a planetarium app on an iPhone to point you in the right direction.” (We agree, for what it’s worth — it’s the same advice at the top of our beginner’s stargazing guide, and our binocular picks start at $45.)

His student observing projects still end with results on paper, even when the observing runs on an iPad planetarium app. The reasoning is the whole man in one sentence: “The goal is getting the students to see and think… otherwise there’s no reason to go outside and look up at the night sky in wonder — the images on the internet are so much better.” The point of amateur astronomy was never to produce the best possible picture. It’s to stand under the sky yourself.

And if you’ve ever wondered whether red light is actually still the right answer — or heard that “the military switched to blue-green” — Palmer keeps the receipts on his website: the military’s own human-factors standard still specifies dim red light above 620 nm wherever full dark adaptation matters. We walk through the science in the flashlight guide.

The little companies that built this hobby

Palmer’s last email to me wasn’t about Rigel at all. It was a list — a long one — of other small companies and makers who’ve each carried a piece of amateur astronomy for decades: the one-person mirror shops, the accessory machinists, the family dealers. Some of their founders have already passed, remembered in forum threads and little else. “They all have had a part to play in the history of amateur astronomy,” he wrote, “and deserve to be remembered.”

He’s right, and this page is the first of a series. If there’s a small astronomy company whose story you think deserves telling — or you are one — I’d genuinely like to hear it: admin@outerspacetrip.com.