After 15 years, I can finally say I'm done!
It all started when our family friend Maureen Hoy told us about this place called Chabot Science center where a group of amateur telescope makers would meet on friday nights. Kai and I thought it would be fun to go and make a telescope out of toilet paper tubes and old binocular lenses. We soon found out that these guys weren't messing around and that these guys were not only making precision scientific instruments, but even grinding their own lenses by hand! The nerdy builder in me could not pass up this opportunity, so Kai and I bought a 10" wide 2" thick disk of glass and a grinding stone and began to grind our own mirror. In the end, we had a 12" diameter telescope with a 10" mirror that stood over 6' tall!
I loved the fact that basically the same techniques used by Allele to make the first telescope by hand are still some of the most effective ways to grind precision optical lenses. Our guide was a book by Jean Texerau written in the early 1900s that still stands as the telescope makers bible.
Here is Kai, grinding the mirror. It is kind of a zen process taking many many hours with the same motion being repeated over and over around a million times. The process actually relies on random human errors canceling each other out to form perfection. The result, a piece of glass ground with mathematical precision to have perfectly spherical curvature. From here it is just a small step further to get the parabolic shape needed. It took over 100 hours over the course of 4 years.for us to achieve the 1/4 wave accuracy that is considered scientific grade. The young Kai in this picture would never have guessed that he would be 21 years old by the time the project was finished!
I built almost every piece of this telescope by hand including this curved carbon fiber spyder that would spread out the difraction pattern normally caused by the secondary mirror's supports.
When it came time to mount the scope, I couldn't do things the easy way. I decided to make a German Equitorial mount that would allow our telescope counteract the rotation of the earth and track the stars in the sky. With help from many people I gathered and machined the parts for this mount which could be adjusted to line up with the earth's axis of rotation. It got a bit rusty in storage during the years that I had set this project aside.
After all that work, the equitoral mount proved to be too cumbersome, so I gave it to another budding telescope builder and made this much simpler dobsionian mount instead.
Here it is shown colapsed for easy transportation.
Through this whole project, I have realized I'm much more of a builder than an astronomer. I think I have looked at the moon, saturn, jupiter, etc only a few times, but I had a great time building this giant thing (and talking about it)