{"id":453,"date":"2008-03-12T09:44:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-12T13:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=453"},"modified":"2009-01-14T22:48:40","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T02:48:40","slug":"junkbox-telescope-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=453","title":{"rendered":"Junkbox Telescope Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery<\/a>, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite<\/i> dead…) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built out of junk since 1966. Longtime Contra readers have seen some of the photos, but a few are new scans of prints I've had in a box for decades.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jeff Duntemann's Junkbox Telescope Gallery<\/a> sat unfinished on a thumb drive for some months, until I finally bore down and finished it a few days ago. It's not a how-to; there has never been and will probably never be a better junkbox telescope how-to than Sam Brown's classic All About Telescopes<\/i><\/a>, which is in turn a compendium of shorter booklets that Brown published through Edmund Scientific in the early-mid 1960s. $14.95 is cheap for a book like this. If you ever have the least inclination to put together a scope from scratch, buy Brown's book first.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The page is mostly a photo collection, with some odd notes on how I did what I did. Note well that you don't have to grind and polish your own mirror as I did. Ready-made 8″ primary mirrors can be had for $300 or sometimes less, and the rest of the scope can be, well, junk. Also note that I think Dobsonian mounts are silly: With a 2″ 45\u00b0 street elbow you can have something approaching an equatorial mount if you live in the US.<\/p>\n

Building scopes like this is mostly a lost art, and there are definitely advantages to scraping up the cash for a Meade or a Celestron. (Tapping in “M31” on a keypad is less messy than lying on your back in a cowfield and sighting the nearly invisible object along the edge of the tube.) But it's a good kid project, because when you're done you\u2014and any involved kids\u2014 will know exactly<\/i> how it works, and that's worth something all by itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite dead…) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built out of junk since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[41,68],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daybook","tag-astronomy","tag-telescopes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":469,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions\/469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}