Junkbox Telescope Gallery

[jeff_duntemann]

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite dead...) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built

Comments

[johnridley]

I've owned pretty much nothing but dobsonians (other than a small grab-n-go scope, and one Schmidt-cass 8" which was OK but too small). I have a 15" and live where there's light pollution. I'd hate to try to haul a 15" equatorial scope to a site 20 miles away in my minivan

[jeff_duntemann]

You're a better (and probably younger, and almost certainly stronger) man than I. I worked with Rich Fagin (not sure if you know him) on a 16" scope years ago, and it was getting so huge and heavy that I let him buy my half of the project

[johnridley]

If a dob is wobbly, it's just badly built and no two ways about it. One of the primary reasons people build dobs is that they're so much more solid than eq mounts. It's completely beyond any sense that something that is essentially a plywood box with a center of gravity 2 feet off the ground wouldn't be more stable than something much heavier with a CG several feet higher balanced on a pipe

Re: soldering up your own Altair

[baron_waste]

If I may cut in, I have to agree with the point you made. It's true, people don't do the kind of Heathkit hobbycrafting you describe. Mr Duntemann has mentioned writing hex code by hand; nowadays hex editors are commonplace. I once worked out the orbital dynamics of a fictional gas giant and its moons using paper, pencil, time and a TI-30 - nowadays there are applets online that will calculate orbits.

The point is that soldering components by hand, hex code by hand and pages of scribbled notes and numbers are primitive arrangements. No, “new and improved” are not always synonyms - but once upon a time, operating an automobile was so complex a task that a chauffeur was necessary, possessing the same idiosyncratic knowledge of the motorcar as a livery hostler knows of horses. Today your teenage daughter hops in, starts it up and drives off without a thought. (Some people never even open the hood.So, your backyard hobbyist of today does not grind his own mirrors. What the heck, he never smelted the glass either. Where you do have

[johnridley]

FWIW, here's my dob:
http://miastro.com/atm/index.html
I no longer use a digital setting circle, I didn't like it. I found that I prefer to star-hop, even if it takes me a half hour to find something.
I've also added a University Optics 8x50 finder with an Amici prism, and switched to a Telrad reflex finder.