My Life in Amateur Astronomy
If you'd like to learn how to make your own telescope, visit the bottom of this page for some reference material.
I became infatuated with space when I was a kid. My first recollections begin just after Gemini and just before Apollo, when I would go to the library and pull out an encyclopedia to read about space flight. I still remember the vivid pictures of Ed White making the first space walk, and a picture from a Gemini capsule of the "alligator" in space. I was hooked.
In 1977, I decided I needed to know my way around the sky and commited myself to learning the constellations. At that time, the only star group I could pick out was the Big Dipper, so I plunked down a buck ninety five and bought myself an "Astronomy" magazine. The center pages in that magazine have always been "The Sky Almanac", a little map of the sky for the particular month it happens to be. I got the step ladder out of the garage, grabbed the magazine, climbed up on the roof, and laid back on the shingles. I opened up my map, took out my red covered flashlight, and went to work.
Starting with the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, on the map, I saw that the two stars in the front of the bowl point to the North Star, Polaris. (Latter on I found out, they're called "The Pointers", by some, for that very reason). Once I found the North Star I worked my way from there to outline the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. After playing connect the stars on Ursa Minor, my map told me that Draco the dragon winds its way between the two dippers and star by star, I traced out his pattern in the sky.
Now I was feeling pretty good, I knew three constellations! WOW, one map, a half an hour, and BINGO... three down, a bunch to go, but that was OK. I sat back and traced and retraced the figures in the sky so I could find them backwards and forwards. Then I spent another hour with my dad's binoculars cruising the stars on that warm breezy summer night.
There's nothing like sitting on the roof in the summer and watching the stars. You're up off the ground so you've got a good breeze. There's fewer bugs. You're laying at a comfortable angle for holding binoculars or just scanning the sky with your eyes and the smell of summer is so fresh and alive. It's perfect.
Every clear night for the next couple weeks, I went out, got the ladder, climbed up on the roof, laid back and learned three more constellations by the star hopping method. Look at the map, see what points to what, and find it in the sky.
After a couple weeks, I had learned all the constellations and could find them even on partly cloudy nights. I was pretty happy. Now I had to wait for the next month. I had to wait because as time goes by, the earth travels around the sun. As it travels, some constellations sink into the morning twilight and new ones rise after the sun sets, so each month for a year you get a few new constellations to learn.
After that year, I knew the vast majority of the constellations. I didn't bother to learn a few of the very dim ones. I grew up in a development with street lights, (I hate street lights), and the more lights you have, the fewer stars you see. If you can't see 'em, you can't learn 'em.
The following year I was out garage sale-ing, (something you do a lot of as a teenager if you want to buy something cheap), and I came across my prize. It was a 2 1/4" spotting scope. It was olive green,(yuck), had a big dent in the tube, and the lens had a flaw, but if you kept your object in the lower left part of the eyepiece, it gave you a pretty good image. It was 5 bucks, and it was mine. My first telescope! Boy was I excited. I took it home, took it apart, and cleaned it from top to bottom. That night, I'd look at the stars with a real telescope!
Now for months I had been reading a book from the "Little Professor" bookshop's clearance rack called "The Handbook of Amateur Astronomy". It had all sorts of articles on the moon, the planets, variable stars, a little section on how to make a telescope, and other cool stuff. In one section, it detailed the history of Astronomy. It told what type of telescope Galileo had made and all about the Greats of telescope making from centuries past. It talked about how people used to have single lens telescopes which had all sorts of chromatic aberration but still made great discoveries, and it talked about what it meant to SEE something. Now, anyone can go to a telescope, look in the eyepiece and see something, but this book told me if you work on it and look really hard, you're going to see more than the average guy. Great observers have two different abilities. Some people can see detail much better than others, and some can see objects which are much dimmer than others. This book told me you can train your eye to do either one, but you had to work at it. Observing is a learned art.
Here, I've just grabbed it off the shelf, (I never get rid of books), I'll give you a quote from Sir William Herschel... "You must not expect to see at sight. Seeing is in some respects an art which must be learned. Many a night have I been practicing to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice." page 58, The Amateur Astronomer's Handbook by James Muirden, revised expanded edition 1974.
So, the big night has arrived. I have THE TELESCOPE!!! I consult my sky map, find Jupiter, and point my scope and BLAAAHHHH. This ugly yellow/orange blob is pulsating at me in the eyepiece. Bummer. I was looking forward to those Palomarian type pictures of stately Jupiter with it's equitorial cloud belts jumping out at me, but this was junk. I sat there for a moment completely disappointed... and then I remembered my book. It said Galileo's telescope was a single convex lens with a single concave lens eyepiece and it was junk, yet he discovered Jupiter's moons and Saturns rings, and the moon had craters, and all sorts of stuff. Maybe I should try it again. I held my breath, looked in the eyepiece, and BLAAAAAHHHHH, it's still an ugly yellow pulsating blob. Bummer. But, I decide to look at this puppy for at least 20 minutes a night and TRY to SEE something. The first night, nothing. The second night, nothing. The third night, those points of light around the big yellow blob have moved from the night before. I had DISCOVERED the Galilean moons!
Now, night after night, I could watch the dance of the moons as they moved in and out around Jupiter. that was cool! I still could not see any detail at all on Jupiter, but the moons, I had the moons.
A couple weeks went by and every clear night, I'd get out the step ladder, climb up on the roof, set up my telescope, and try to SEE.
It's been about four weeks now and tonight I do the same routine, but tonight I look in the eyepiece and WOW, what's that? I've never seen that before. There's two lines cutting across the center of Jupiter. They're darker than the rest and they're as plain as the nose on your face. It's obvious, they're there. They line up with the moons, they must be the equitorial belts. I'm amazed. Every night after that, they were obvious, but for four weeks I had seen nothing. As the weeks went by I slowly started to see a little more detail and little more. A couple of very fine lines parallel to the big ones but closer to the poles. It was true, you can LEARN to SEE.
My eyesight at my last eye exam was 20:13 which means (as it was explained to me) I can see at 20 feet what the average guy sees at 13 feet. That's with the eye I trained for detail. With my other eye I was only 20:18. There must be something going on in the brain which you can tweak by repeated effort which enhances vision. As a side note, I'm the only person in my immediate family (6 of us) who doesn't wear glasses. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Getting back to Astronomy, I spent a year and a half playing with that telescope, working on my observing skills, trying to see more and more. Then, in the summer of 1979, I decided I wanted to get a bigger scope. Nothing outlandish, nothing too expensive, but something better.
After perusing the ads from the major manufacturers, I figured
there was no way I could afford a new scope with all the bells and whistles. There was no place locally I could buy a used one, so that left me no option, I would build myself a telescope.
Once again, it was Astronomy magazine to the rescue. They were running ads for reprints from "Telescope Making" magazine on how to build a 10" Dobsonian Telescope. I sent off my order and received a red booklet in the mail describing, step by step how to build a telescope. After consulting parts prices again, I opted for an 8" mirror instead of 10" and sent in my order to Meade.
A couple weeks went by, my family was on vacation, and coming home from work on my bike, I found a big box from UPS sitting on the front step. I brought the box inside and it was Christmas in July. I had my mirrors, my modified achromatic eyepieces, my Barlow lens, and my colored filters. I was primed and ready to go. A couple years before, I had made a little box out of cherry and lined it with green velvet. I had never had anything I thought would really go in the box but now I dug it out and the eyepieces, Barlow, and filters fit like I had made it for them. They still reside there.
That weekend I headed down to the local hardware store and purchased a Sono tube, some pine shelving, and a couple 2x4's, and I set myself to work on the construction of my first home made telescope. I made a dobsonian type tube assembly with the sono tube & pine shelving and an english mount made out of the 2x4's. I worked out an adjustable spider assembly with my dad and he brought the plans to school where the shop teacher fabricated it for me. I spent the next weekend putting it all together and my first test blew my dad away. Our house was adjacent to the local elementary school's yard and across the yard about a fifth of a mile from the back fence were some oak trees. I pointed the scope at those trees and we could see the acorns blowing in the breeze.
That night the sky was alive. Millions of stars were within my grasp and I stayed up half the night looking at the globular cluster in Hercules, the ring nebula in Lyra, Jupiter, Saturn, the double cluster, and all sorts of other wonders in the summer. It was great!
I rebuilt the entire telescope in the summer of 1992 to make it more mobile. I made a hexagonal tube out of poplar plywood and set it in a pine dobsonian mount. It's got two brass handles on the sides for easy carrying.
That same year at Stellafane , I came across a beautiful 3" doublet objective lens on the swap table for $50! I brought it home, got some suitable copper pipe from my father inlaw, and made myself a 3" refractor. Three bucks bought me my mount (at another garage sale) and I was in business. Considering what the big manufacturers want for a three-incher, $53 ain't bad. It's so nice and light, I use it for the bulk of my observing now. When the comet fragments smashed into Jupiter a few years ago, my little 3" gave me some fantastic views.
I've put together a couple other telescopes over the years, and they all get dragged out from time to time as the occasion warrants, but all the scopes I've finished have had optics which I purchased elsewhere. I always felt a little bad about that and finally decided to do something about it.
Last year I started grinding a 6" f/7 mirror. I figured 6" was small enough to be mobile and it would still have more light gathering capability than my 3". I started out by reading "Amateur Telescope Making" from Scientific American Publishing Co. 1928 the second edition, which I picked up at the Stellafane swap tables.
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