Info on building a home-made teliscope?

[[]V[]essenjah]

I've been recently playing around with my new telescope and it isn't bad for a cheep one. I've been looking at saturn and I can see it's rings but no surface detail. I've looked through some home-made telescopes that you can see surface details with so I was wondering, how much it would cost or what it would take to build a home-made teliscope? I figured this question has to go for the nerds such as myself who like to stargaze. Besides, it would be fun to take a girl out one night and show her some planets.

[Lothar]

I have a friend who built his own telescope, but he has industrial-quality machinery to do it with, so he's probably not much help (unless you already have the necessary machinery, of course.)

[bash]

Just don't show her Uranus. *groan*

[Robo]

it would be fun to take a girl out one night and show her some planets.

I do that all the time. It IS fun.

I can't help when it comes to making a home-made one though :-/

[Battlebot]

it depends what kinda telescope you want to build. refracting teles arent as hard cuz basically all it is is lenses behind each other...

relecting telescopes are erally hard to build because mainly aligning the mirror with the eyepiece has to be at or very near perfect to get a decent image.

but good luck with whatever you do....

[Mobius]

I've been looking at saturn and I can see it's rings but no surface detail.

Point of fact: Saturn has no surface.

It's atmosphere all the way down to the Metallic-Hydrogen core! Admittedly, it's almost a solid atmosphere by then, because pressures are probably on the order of millions of atmospheres...

[Duper]

I worked with a guy that built his own 19" reflective telescope.

And he cut and polished the mirror himself. 0_o

[roid]

i know a guy who made his own (pretty large) tellescope, ground the lense himself. he lives near me, do you want me to quiz him or something? i can get pics of it if you want.

[MD-2389]

I've been looking at saturn and I can see it's rings but no surface detail.

Point of fact: Saturn has no surface.

It's atmosphere all the way down to the Metallic-Hydrogen core! Admittedly, it's almost a solid atmosphere by then, because pressures are probably on the order of millions of atmospheres...

He's talking about about detail of the outer surface Mobi. You know, as in the color bands in the atmosphere... Stop being an idiot. We all know that Saturn is a gas giant.