Just to let you know that my 14" binocular telescope is nearing completion after the components have been sitting in my shed for several years.
These were gifted to me by a friend who found that he was developing dementia, and included all the marine ply, optics and the electronics for making it fully go-to. My friend sadly passed away a couple of years back, and I decided to build it in his honour.
I finally got around to it, having retired from my Astronomy Education business, and I have been building it over the last few months. There have been some interesting constraints due to the focussers which my friend supplied, which are helical with only 7mm of travel(!!!), and a range of other issues- especially related to the motor drives, but I have nearly sorted them all out.
I could probably fine-tune it and run it as a push-to dob this weekend, but I don't think the clouds are going to cooperate.
At this stage it looks like I will take it with me to a dark-sky camp next week, so first light might be under Bortle 1 skies. Not much else will fit in my car though: it is big!!!
Below is a piccie of the "skeleton" in my shed this afternoon. Hopefully I can put in all the glass and balance it tomorrow, but I won't be able to collimate it properly until it is under the night sky due to the inability to focus on anything other than at infinity!
If there is interest I will write up the construction as an article when it is up and running.
My next major problem now is where to store it! Assembled it is nearly 2m high, and the rocker and mirror boxes are around 900mm x 500mm (6 1/2 ft high by 3 ft by 1 1/2 ft for you Americans!).
Dean
A couple more images during construction:
- This is before the glue-up for the mirror box. Lots of dovetails!
- The mirror cells have to have multiple degrees of freedom to make sure that not only is each mirror collimated, but they are parallel to each other
- The rocker box ends are 34mm plywood, so the dovetails were pretty tricky
