Thanks for that post! I have a neighbor that took a class, actually ground-by-hand a mirror and built one very similar. It is superior in every way to the commercial version I bought (which can clearly pull in the rings of Saturn, and the color banks of Jupiter). I've wanted to try my hand at building one, but wasn't thrilled with the idea of hand grinding a mirror.
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I would love to build one from scratch, including grinding the mirror. About 12 years ago, I searched high and low for information on how to do that, without success.
-- Howard Lee Harkness Texas Certified Concealed Handgun Instructor
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Brian and Howard: "Telescope Making" by Jean Texereau will guide you through the mirror-making process. Beware however--it's a black art. I've done one successfully and another a lot less so. I've also assembled Dobs by buying the optical and mechanical components and building the cabinetry. Very satisfying. Email for a discussion, since we're pretty OT here.
Look up Albert G. Ingalls's "Amateur Telescope Making," in three volumes. The first volume will give you all the basics; the others will get you to a lot of sophisticated stuff. Out of print, I think, but abebooks lists a lot of used copies. Well worth having, even if you never get around to building a telescope.
Howard, join up with a local astronomy club. It is going to be your best source of information for what is available in your area. I found out that John Dobson teaches a class 20 miles from here about once every year. I would have never found out about it without being involved in the club. I have not done it yet, but I know several people who have. Don't give up!
I have had the pleasure of knowing a few "country geniuses" in my life. One of them was my father, and two more were two of the three men he ever called "true friends". By that I mean they shared a special kinship, a bond of spirit and intellect. I only left the third friend out because he was from California and had a college education; he was no less a genius, only more traditional and less remarkable.
Anyhoo, one of the friends made an 8" reflector when I was a young teen. I was fascinated by the process. He ground his own mirrors, and purchased a hospital-surplus autoclave, in which he silvered them. He made his own collimator, and explained to me the collimation process.
After it was completed, we viewed with remarkable clarity the Queen Wilhelmina Inn atop Rich Mountain (Arkansas), some 20 miles distant. I never viewed stars with it. I don't know that he did, either; he tended to be driven more by fascination with process than with the end use of the product.
The last time I spoke to him, sometime in the 1980's, he was busy excavating a hole to bedrock. It was a hole he would fill with several cubic yards of concrete, to serve as a stable platform for his latest surplus purchase: a scanning electron microscope.
If you'd asked him why he needed an electron microscope, you'd have gotten a puzzled stare. Does "need" matter? It's interesting!
He and my father were graduates of Hatfield, AR, High School. When I graduated HHS 32 years later, my class had 24 graduates, the largest in the school's history (my sister graduated 4 years earlier, with 11 in her class).
Neither man had further schooling, although casual acquaintances would assume they had advanced education. They were like that, you see.
People with active minds are drawn together. Hence, groups like the wreck. ;-)
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