Telescope Making [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYpjlQpsANY

by gosub • 12 years ago

13 1 12 years ago

imroot• 12 years ago

This is something that I am really passionate about.

I have a farm in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky, that I've put a glass studio in part of the unfinished side of my pole barn (I use the other side for electronics assembly, testing, and debugging) that I use for casting the blanks for grinding the mirrors.

I use a High Def projector and a 12MP DSLR camera to identify parts of the mirror that need to be ground down more and then ultimately verify that the curvature of the glass is correct.

There's an observatory about 200 miles away near Columbus, Ohio that can mirrorize the glass (it's a 3 day process), and I usually donate my last telescope to the observatory for letting me use their equipment (and I bring my own supplies).

I've attempted to make my own lenses, but, there's just too much room for error in that process.

Once I have the mirrors and lenses correctly, I've been playing around with NEMA-34 stepper motors and kflop/kstep motor controllers to power my polar object tracking -- there are usually two buttons on the telescope that I use -- one for releasing the steppers and the other for energizing and starting to track -- along with encoders so that I can get an approximation of the night sky.

I love living in the middle of nowhere, in Kentucky for the stars, and my ability to do unique farm tech (temperature and water quality sensors using raspberry pi's and mesh networking, GPS and yield sensors on my tractors, solar powered wifi repeaters to my 'city home' for fast internet).

Telescope Making [video]

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