How to build a telescope

Is there an easy and financial saving way of making/building a homemade telescope like for example one that is powerful enough to see into space and simple enough so that any one here can make one

i actually have a store bought telescope already but its actually quite crap to be honest i think it would be quite good to know how to make one myself and be able to tune it and so on or maybe build onto my existing one i dunno whatever i just want one that i can tune to be more powerful and see deeper into space

thanks anyway

Have you tried Google.

Google is a search engine many of us have come to use for common and uncommon questions of various sorts.

Cheers!

[edit on 1/14/2009 by Amaxium]

If you want to build then you will want to go down the route of a Dob. Have a look around the net, but here is a little starter:

www.mydob.co.uk...

Meade make some reasonably priced truss Dobs which get good reviews. As for easy use, then the best would be high-power binoculars.....or, paying money and getting a GPS based telescope (which I have, and can say is excellent).

General store scopes are a no-no really. And one of the most important things (apart from quality of glass/optics) is the mount. Too many people buy a big scope on a tatty mount and then find it useless.

Have fun.

I'm sure there are many more on here who have more advice and more experience than I but it should get you going....Oh, and if you can go to a local astro meet where you will find lots of people who have been where you are and offer good advice.

reply to post by Anti - Government


Making a telescope is actually pretty easy, the only problem are the costs. A good telescope needs a good lens, and you will probably find that the lens by itself is probably more expensive than a new telescope with the lens already installed.

The most important part of a telescope in the reflector category is the mirror. The bigger the mirror the better. 8" or higher in diameter.

The rest can be made from stuff from home depot.

you can make a pseudoscope yourself with lenses etc you may already have lying around.

the power of the scope is determined by the ratio of the focal length of the main lens to the focal length (fl) of the eye lens.
so, for example, with a 500 mm fl front lens and a 50 mm fl eye lens,
you have a 500/50 ratio, or 10/1, thus a 10x power scope.

shorter fl eye lenses, say 25, 10, 5, etc would give powers of
20x, 50x, 100x respectively with that same 500 mm fl front lens.


more light gathering, for dimmer space objects, is determined mainly by the diameter of the front lens.

edmund scientific,
sky and telescope
astronomy
astronomy now

all have information and sources for parts.

I bought this book years ago and have used it successfuly twice..both Dobsonian mounts.

www.willbell.com...

I would reccomend it to beginners and seasoned veterans alike..

happy hunting!

p.s. there is an outfit in California as well as one in Conneticut, that will sell you polished glass or slab and the book tells you how to create a matrix pattern for polishing/beveling glass your self.

[edit on 14-1-2009 by deadbang]

You could start by buying a good book on telescope building.

I will assume you want to go with a Newtonian reflector (Simple, one precision parabolic mirror and an eye piece lens assembly as opposed to a Casagrain (two mirrors one eye piece lens assembly with a hole in the center of the large mirror) or a Schmidt (wide field) telescope ( one mirror, one complex large correcting lens and an eye piece assembly).

As to the mount you have a general choice of an Alt-Az (Altitude Azimuth) mount (Such as a Dob (Dobsonian) ) mount or a polar mount (perhaps with a clock drive).

An Altitude Azimuth mount aims the telescope at a star by an angle above the horizon (Altitude) and a compass direction to a point on the horizon (Azimuth).

Dobsonians were designed and described by John Dobson of San Francisco, Ca. Dobs use cheap bearings such as Formica on Formica.

I once designed (but never built) a Dobsonian that could be made from two sheets of plywood for a mirror with a focal length of 96" or less. (Oddly enough I found that by changing a few cuts I could make it into a Polar mount.)
One sheet is cut to form a hexagonal tube.
The other sheet is cut to form other parts including a hexagonal end plug about 7-8" on a side, and a disk, two trapazoids and two triangles (to form the tube support fork), and a box like base. (If you make the base square you get a Dobsonian, if you slant the base to the local Latitude, and aim thepivot of the fork at the North Pole you get a Polar mount.)

You can buy a ready made mirror on E-Bay or from Edmund Scientific of Barrington, NJ.

Originally posted by Amaxium
Have you tried Google.

Google is a search engine many of us have come to use for common and uncommon questions of various sorts.

Cheers!

[edit on 1/14/2009 by Amaxium]

Very sarcastic...and not original. I use search.wikia.com.

reply to post by Amaxium


Well yes i obviously have tried google

its far better to get real information from people who have potentially tried this instead of finding some crap on a website that doesnt even work

and i was hoping to actually get some information from people this is a forum website you know !!

another one of those double posts



[edit on 15-1-2009 by Anti - Government]

reply to post by Anti - Government


Understandable......

I was in a quirky mood yesterday. I have been doing more research into this and I find that YouTube is still a valuable resource for most How To's as you are probably going to find video showing how it's done.

Here is one promising video which may help.

reply to post by Amaxium


I think i should apologize aswell im in a bit of a mood recently alot of things going on right now

my bad

I had a Celestron 8" refractor with asts and GPS, it was great, had to get rid of it for $, bummed me out.
Was relatively cheap, got it on sale for $385.00, was $525.00, so there are some good deals out there.
It was length 42" ap. 8" with 50X path finder it was a 2130 Celestron.
Kind of backwards discussion there, but made teh point..
Also came with computer software to connect to a laptop..
"Very Nice!!"