I just scored a double piece of astronomical history: a "Moonwatch" 120x20 f5 refractor. This was part of the program set up in around 1957, initiated by Harvard astronomer Fred L. Whipple, at the time the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Amateur groups around the world helped find and track satellites such as Sputnik; and they used all sorts of telescopes. Some select groups were given 120x20 refractors which I understand were cannibalised from WW2 ships' binoculars. This is one of them! The second piece of astronomical history it embodies is that it was used by the late Bill Bradfield, along with his home-made newtonian reflector, in his comet searching.
Bill discovered 18 comets from 1971-2004, and spent over 3,500 hours getting up before dawn and searching for them. All were visual discoveries (he held the world record for visual discoveries), and all were attributed to just Bill. Unfortunately for him, they were discovered in an era when there were no prizes offered for amateur comet discoveries: he commented to me once that if it was another era (like more recently, or in the 19th century!) he would have had enough prize money to buy a house...
Here is a link to a youtube video about Bill:
Some more information is on the Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Bradfield The reflector shown in the video is currently held at the observing site of the Astronomical Society of South Australia. It is an amazing piece of "agricultural" telescope building embodying a fixed height eyepiece, and we intend to display it as a tribute to Bill.
I have managed to unscrew the objective lens and cleaned it, and it gives very good correct image daytime views with the included fixed eyepiece and prism (a 2.4°
Below is a picture of the scope with a 30cm ruler for scale. In line with its military history it is incredibly solid: I suspect you could drive a car over it without any damage!
If anyone is interested I will take and attach some more images shortly.
- Dean