When we bought our first house in ‘97, the first thing I did with my new garage and workbench, was build my telescope. I rebuilt the base shortly after we moved to the farm, around ‘04, and I tried to make it as light and compact as possible. Unfortunately that also made it wobbly as it lost some stability.

I tolerated it for a long time, but it was time to rebuild it again, and since I have my new workshop setup at the new house, and a few scraps of 3/4” plywood laying around…

I went for ‘sturdy’ this time. I purchased two 24” discs from Home Depot for the base, and built a solid box above it to hold the scope. Unfortunately I made it about a half inch too short on the first try! The scope couldn’t point straight up! But I worked around that and got everything swinging again.

Then all it needed was a bright yellow coat of paint. My scope has always been blue and yellow. The yellow is practical, because it makes it easier to spot in the dark.

So nice to have all this bench space, and everything neat and organized!

All done! It’s beautiful, and works well again. The base turns smoothly and provides just the right amount of friction so things stay where you point them. I had also had a problem with the front baffle – it was held on by screws, and they poked your fingers when you grabbed it by the front baffle to aim it – which it turned out I did all the time. So I replaced the screws with little bolts. I put up with it like that for years, and it only took 15 minutes to fix, with bolts I already had laying around! Sometimes I amaze myself with my own laziness!

I don’t know how much use this scope will get now that I have the new computerized scope, but I plan to keep it around. At least it will be nice to take to star parties and share it with other people. I went to a star party at a middle school last month and took the computerized scope, and it was a lot of trouble to move, to setup, and then having people bumping it and pulling on it made me nervous, and carrying it from the car to the setup made me really nervous – it’s so heavy, and I didn’t want to drop it! I know they can’t do anything to hurt this one, so it’s a better choice for public outreach!

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I spent last night at an astronomy meeting. I dragged out my telescope, barely knocked the dust off of it, and headed out to the meeting, a bit shy and not sure what to expect. My scope is big, but it’s nothing fancy. Here’s an old picture of us at Table Mountain Star Party a few years ago.

I shouldn’t have worried. Everyone was really nice, and we all had one thing in common – a love of the heavens. Everyone enjoyed looking through my scope (yay – something new!) just as much as I enjoyed looking through theirs, most of which were as big as mine, and newer and fancier. But my old scope has excellent optics, which is all that matters, so even if it looks a bit funky, it still does the job just as good as the new scopes.

I have been out of it a long time because of my ‘cold allergy‘ but now that I have that pretty well under control with Zyrtec I want to get the scope out more and enjoy the dark skies we have at our house. We also used to do lots of school science fairs and ‘sidewalk astronomy’ with it, and it’s always great fun to give the general public a chance to look through a big telescope.

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One of these days I will get to see an aurora, but not today. I got my hopes up because there was a big sun storm earlier this week scheduled to hit today, but as usual – nothing visible here. Luckily time spent outside with my telescope is never time wasted. I passed the time either relaxing in my tent and watching the stars, or scanning them up close with the telescope, and hunting down the interesting nebula and clusters that I remembered how to find without looking them up in a book.

I had some fun shooting pictures of stars too, but it’s tricky to get the exposure right. This was a shot of the milky way, and I liked the color that came out in the tree, considering everything was black in the viewfinder, so I had to just point and shoot and see what came out.

I’ll admit I was excited to hear they would be crashing something on the moon, and that it would be visible to folks with big telescopes (because I have a big telescope, and because the moon is pretty much static so it would be cool to actually see something happen), but disappointed when I heard I needed at least 500 power to view it, since my smallest eyepiece is about half that, and even at that magnification you have to constantly nudge nudge nudge the scope to keep what you’re looking at in view. I’ve never gone higher power, and rarely even use my high power eyepiece anyway, because it’s a rare day when the atmosphere is still enough to see at that magnification. So last night I stayed in bed while NASA crashed their project into the moon. I heard from other astronomers that our area was socked in by clouds anyway, so just as well.

I didn’t want to miss the excitement, so I set the DVR to record NASA TV. NASA TV is about as dull as watching paint dry, even to me, and I’m actually interested in what they’re doing! While setting up the DVR I had it on ISS coverage briefly as they determined that the new space treadmill wasn’t working. Nothing like ten minutes of the view from a camera pointed at a treadmill that isn’t moving. That’s some gripping TV right there!

You’d think someone could make it more engaging. But instead it’s the same old thing: watching people at flight control punching away on their laptops. Hard to decipher technical messages between the various stations. At least in this case there was an interesting view from the LCROSS spacecraft as it got closer and closer. And then the screen went white. So I assume that was impact. The guys at mission control clapped, got up and stretched, folded up their laptops and got out of there. And that was it. Literally, they were clearing the room within 15 seconds! And then the announcers said they’d have pictures in about 2 hours! What, are you kidding me? I’m so glad I didn’t climb out of bed at 4:30AM for that – talk about anti-climactic!

I’m sure they were off to another room to work on some important science stuff, but still, you think that for an event that had been covered this much in the last couple weeks, they could have found a way to make it more interesting to the general public. It’s stuff like this where people actually get excited to see what NASA is doing, and then they let us down. Might as well have not even built it up if there’s going to be nothing to see. I mean, I’ve been being disappointed by NASA for many years, so I had pretty low expectations for the event, and they managed to set the bar even lower.

I have been selling off some of my extra toys, and I listed my telescope for sale on Craigslist. After all, I never use it anymore, it just takes up space and gathers dust in the garage. I am kind of attached to it, it’s the very first thing I ever built with my own two hands, and I’ve had it over ten years now. I’ve taken it to many local ‘sidewalk astronomy’ public viewing get-togethers, two Table Mountain Star Parties in Central WA, and took it all the way to Oklahoma on our big trailer trip a few years ago. But ever since I started having cold hives (I get hives if my skin gets chilled even a bit, and it’s miserable) I just don’t want to stand around outside in the cold all night, and I can only use it if I’m bundled up like I’m going on a mountain expedition, even on a warm summer night. So I got it out and cleaned it up, and someone came over to look at it yesterday. They said they’d think about it and left.

So it was just sitting out there in the yard when it started getting dark, and there was a nice sliver of a moon out after sunset. I brought out an eyepiece and started looking at the moon. The sky was perfectly still and the view was superb! So I went inside and got another eyepiece, and put on a coat and my fleece pants. A bit later I came in for another eyepiece. Then my moon filter to pick out the details. Then I noticed the big dipper directly overhead and remembered there were some spectacular galaxies to look at in that area. So I went and got a star map and a flashlight. By the time I came back in around midnight I canceled the ad for the telescope.

Maybe the scope is one of those things I should just plan on keeping.

In case anyone doesn’t think I’m well rounded enough, let me introduce you to my telescope, because on top of everything else, I’m kind of a science geek too. This is a 10 inch, f/6, ‘dob’ style telescope. You look through an eyepiece at the upper end of the tube. It uses mirrors for magnification, instead of lenses. It’s considered an excellent, inexpensive way for amateurs to enjoy a high quality viewing experience. I bought the mirrors for it, but I built the rest of it by myself. In fact I built it when we lived in Yakima in 1997, and finished just in time to enjoy using it to view Comet Hale-Bopp. So this scope has been with me for 11 years! Because of health problems (I’m allergic to cold, an unfortunate condition that only developed in the last few years) I don’t get to use it as much as I used to, and I have toyed with the idea of selling it, but I’m always kind of relieved when no one takes me up on it. It is the first thing I built in my workshop in our first house, and I do have many fond memories of the experience.

In 2003 Dave and I took the Airstream on our second trip to the Table Mountain Star Party (that was so much nicer than the previous trip, when we stayed in the pop top camper van). There were lots of fancy scopes there, much fancier than my little scope, but it’s still fun to share it with folks who come by for a peek. Everyone peeks through everyone elses scopes at a Star Party!

People oooh and ahh over the scope for it’s unique construction. Many of these big homebuilt scopes have a cardboard tube. They use a concrete form – a heavy-duty cardboard, and it certianly stands up to the mild abuse a scope gets. I decided I wanted mine to be very sturdy, and so I built it out of PVC instead. It has been to many school science fairs and sidewalk astronomy outings, and I never have to worry about anyone hurting it, it’s built like a tank.

Because I drove a Geo Tracker when I built it, I needed it to break down to something more compact than it’s 60 inch tube. So I put a seam in the middle, and the tube comes apart.

This is how it looked before it’s most recent paint job.

I have rebuilt it several times, modifying the box it sits on and the way the tube pivots on the box. When I first built it I needed a ladder to see out of it when it was pointing straight up, but over the years I modified it until I could see out of it in any position. I also added baffles and better spotting scopes, and a fancier eyepiece focuser. I blacked out the inside of the tube with a flat black paint with sand mixed in to make it really cut down on light bouncing around in there.

So what everyone wants to know is – what can you see with it? Well, I can see the red spot on Jupiter, the ice caps on Mars, and the rings of Saturn – even the gap between the rings on a good day. And of course I can see all sorts of neat galaxies and nebula, colorful double stars and spectacular star clusters. When I used it on Comet Hale-Bopp I could see a neat corkscrew where the tail came off the head of the comet, something I never quite saw replicated in pictures.

But the big showstopper is always the moon. Here’s a picture of the moon at the lowest magnification. Click on the picture to see more detail. Of course with higher magnifications it is really impressive, and you can see the Apollo moon landing sites (but no, you can’t see the moon buggy or the lander or flag), and hunt down some of the landmarks you can see in the pictures. It’s amazing to see a crater on the moon and know people were right there!

So after 11 years I still have my faithful old telescope. I pulled it out tonight for the first time in a couple years, and it didn’t dissapoint. Later I’ll get to peek at some planets through it. It really is a unique and fun instrument to have around.