Homemade Telescope
There are three small products of technology that I have long wanted but for various reasons hsve never had, though plenty of people, mostly men, have at least one of them and often more, especially in this country. Those items are a good pocket watch, a strong telescope, and a powerful microscope.
I have two pocket watches (you should have two of everything), but both are on the very modest side and both stopped running after only a short time. One was given to me and I bought the other one, though, because of how I hate to return stuff, I never mailed it back to be fixed or to be replaced. (I've never wanted a wristwatch because I don't like things that I wasn't born with being part of my person, and that also goes for anything around my neck, around my fingers, etc.)
Through playing trivia games online, about a decade ago I became acquainted with a nice lady down in Mississippi who at the time had a job selling high power microscopes to various institutions, including colleges and government labs. I talked to her a little about buying a microscope, but the prices were out of my range, and anyway, shortly afterward she moved on to other employment and that was that.
I have a very good and somewhat affluent friend over on Virginia's Northern Neck who had a great-looking telescope sitting in his living room. When I admired it he offered it to me, free, because at one time we had worked together and had been close friends for many years, and also because he never used it. But I turned it down, for several reasons, though the main one was that I thought it was far too fine a piece of equipment for him to be giving away, and a little later he gave it to someone else, and so that was that, too.
I was reminded of these things because yesterday I happened across a website that offered plans for building a model of the Hubble space telescope, a celebrated instrument that seems to be able to see almost back to the beginning of the Universe, and it has just been repaired by astronauts again, for another 10 years of good use. That interested me, till I saw that the models were merely to be admired and could in no way be used to look at the Moon and the stars or even a bird outside your window.
But then for the first time I started wondering how much would be involved in building an actual good-sized, homemade, working telescope.
It occurred to me that things were different from the way they were 40 or 50 years ago when, after getting this idea, I might never have hesitated to tackle such a project, and I thought of how nowadays there is such a marvel as Google right at my fingertips, whereby I can instantly get information on almost every conceivable undertaking that formerly would have taken a lot of effort and time to get.
And there it was, all a person would ever need to know about making telescopes at home, and about how it had already been done by many people for many years. The very first post I read was somebody saying they had heard of people making a telescope lens from the cutoff bottom of a bottle, and that was right down my alley, philosophically speaking. Then, on the other end of things, I found this very interesting article about a cardiologist up in Massachusetts who has a giant 11-foot telescope that he made himself. It has a 32-inch mirror, and he has it sitting in a rotating dome that he also built himself, atop his house, at a total cost of a mere $30,000. And with this rig he has looked at stars that are as far as 10 billion light-years away. That's right. Ten billion light-years!
I have two pocket watches (you should have two of everything), but both are on the very modest side and both stopped running after only a short time. One was given to me and I bought the other one, though, because of how I hate to return stuff, I never mailed it back to be fixed or to be replaced. (I've never wanted a wristwatch because I don't like things that I wasn't born with being part of my person, and that also goes for anything around my neck, around my fingers, etc.)
Through playing trivia games online, about a decade ago I became acquainted with a nice lady down in Mississippi who at the time had a job selling high power microscopes to various institutions, including colleges and government labs. I talked to her a little about buying a microscope, but the prices were out of my range, and anyway, shortly afterward she moved on to other employment and that was that.
I have a very good and somewhat affluent friend over on Virginia's Northern Neck who had a great-looking telescope sitting in his living room. When I admired it he offered it to me, free, because at one time we had worked together and had been close friends for many years, and also because he never used it. But I turned it down, for several reasons, though the main one was that I thought it was far too fine a piece of equipment for him to be giving away, and a little later he gave it to someone else, and so that was that, too.
I was reminded of these things because yesterday I happened across a website that offered plans for building a model of the Hubble space telescope, a celebrated instrument that seems to be able to see almost back to the beginning of the Universe, and it has just been repaired by astronauts again, for another 10 years of good use. That interested me, till I saw that the models were merely to be admired and could in no way be used to look at the Moon and the stars or even a bird outside your window.
But then for the first time I started wondering how much would be involved in building an actual good-sized, homemade, working telescope.
It occurred to me that things were different from the way they were 40 or 50 years ago when, after getting this idea, I might never have hesitated to tackle such a project, and I thought of how nowadays there is such a marvel as Google right at my fingertips, whereby I can instantly get information on almost every conceivable undertaking that formerly would have taken a lot of effort and time to get.
And there it was, all a person would ever need to know about making telescopes at home, and about how it had already been done by many people for many years. The very first post I read was somebody saying they had heard of people making a telescope lens from the cutoff bottom of a bottle, and that was right down my alley, philosophically speaking. Then, on the other end of things, I found this very interesting article about a cardiologist up in Massachusetts who has a giant 11-foot telescope that he made himself. It has a 32-inch mirror, and he has it sitting in a rotating dome that he also built himself, atop his house, at a total cost of a mere $30,000. And with this rig he has looked at stars that are as far as 10 billion light-years away. That's right. Ten billion light-years!
Is that a typo, or is it a misstatement? How is it possible to see anything that far away? How is it possible for anything to be that far away? All of that is unimaginable to me...but still highly fascinating.
(I was tempted to wrap this up by wryly saying instead, "Yet people still go to church much more than they check out planetariums." But I was rudely brought up short by the unsettling realization that I myself have never been to one of those star-gazing centers, while I have been to a church plenty of times -- though sensibly not after the age of 16. Yet I've heard that there is a very fine planetarium right up the road from here, only about 45 miles away, high atop a mountain just outside Charlottesville, or "C-ville" as it is sometimes called.)
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 8:29 AM
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