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Info on building a home-made teliscope?

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 12:38 am
by []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. :)

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 12:48 am
by 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.)

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 12:58 am
by bash
Just don't show her Uranus. :oops: *groan*

Re: Info on building a home-made teliscope?

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 1:42 am
by Robo
mob-messenger wrote: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 :-/

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 7:07 am
by 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....

Re: Info on building a home-made teliscope?

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 11:54 pm
by Mobius
mob-messenger wrote: 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...

Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:00 am
by Duper
I worked with a guy that built his own 19" reflective telescope.

And he cut and polished the mirror himself. 0_o

Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:54 am
by 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.

Re: Info on building a home-made teliscope?

Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:43 pm
by MD-2389
Mobius wrote:
mob-messenger wrote: 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...
Image

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.