By Fred Rayworth

In amateur astronomy groups, there tend to be three categories of people. The first is the beginner. They usually show up at meetings and star parties, ask questions, look through scopes, and dream of that big telescope they want. Eventually they pick up something that may or may not be what they want or can afford. The second group is the “serious amateur.” The “serious amateur” spends enormous amounts of money on a fancy telescope setup and usually has a specific goal such as astrophotography. Then there is the third group, the telescope builders and general observers. These people tend to build their own equipment or buy simple setups (Dobsons for instance) and spend the bulk of their time star hopping and looking at as many objects as they can just for the sheer enjoyment. I fall into the third category. For those of you just starting out in this great hobby, the following may get a little technical at times, but bear with me. This could be you someday.

I first became interested in astronomy in Los Angeles. I was visiting my grandpa in Playa Del Rey and he took me outside one night to look at the stars. Back then the smog was not bad enough to completely obliterate the sky. He had an old ship's spyglass. It was like looking through a soda straw at the heavens, but it captured my attention. After a while he pointed to a light moving across the sky. It was Sputnik. The year was 1957 and I became fascinated with space and the stars. I have to admit that monster movies and later Star Trek also played a role in my interest in space.

My first telescope was a Sears 60mm refractor, purchased in 1965. Of course, that was not enough but all I (my dad actually) could afford at the time. In 1966, I met a man that had a huge (for the time) 12” reflector he built himself. That inspired me to buy a mirror grinding kit and I built my first telescope, an 8” reflector. I'd caught the telescope making bug and there was no known cure!

Over the years (and after making several other small mirrors), I always wanted a larger telescope but of course, could never afford it. At one point, I almost sprung for a Coulter 17.5” Odyssey, but could not ship it all the way to Spain where I was stationed. Then one day, I was in a junkyard and spotted a large glass disk. I got it for free! I took it home and discovered it was a 16” aluminized optical flat. It was only 1¼” thick but solid enough for a telescope mirror. I wrote to every telescope manufacturer that had an address in Sky and Telescope asking if they wanted to buy a 16” flat. I received three catalogs, no letters, no hello, no get lost, no nothing. That pretty much decided it for me. I was able to scrounge the rough grinding compound, #36 grit carborundum locally and purchased a piece of ¼” thick plate glass for a tool. I glued ¾” plywood to the back of the tool for support and started grinding. My wife had to put up with the grinding noise and a 55 gallon barrel in the back room of our Spanish house for a year while I ground the glass down. I had to buy the finer stages of grinding compounds, polishing agents, and pitch, but by this point, my total outlay was about $35.00. Because the mirror was so thin, I stopped at f/6.4, afraid to grind any deeper. Another reason I stopped at that focal ratio was because I would not have to worry about coma.

Polishing and figuring was the hard part. I finally found a really nice guy through a Sky and Telescope article, Sherman Shultz in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He sent me a Ronchi grating for testing and a very thick set of papers on polishing techniques. When I first used the Ronchi grating, my mirror was supposed to have straight lines, but instead looked like a butterfly. At about this time, we moved to Turkey, so there was a little over a year when I couldn't work on it. Once we moved into base housing, I had my barrel set up in the carport and started in again. After going back to fine grinding three different times to erase my mistakes, I finally nailed the figure. Keep in mind that I scrounged virtually everything and my total financial outlay was still around $35.00.

The first time I star tested the mirror, I took it out in the back yard and put the mirror stand on the end of a 10 foot two by four. At the other end I mounted the diagonal from the 8” reflector I made in high school. I held an eyepiece up to the side and by a miracle, found Jupiter. Even with no reflective aluminum coating on the mirror, I could see the red spot and at least three bands on the surface. I knew right then it was time to aluminize that mirror!

Aluminization was the most expensive part of the whole telescope. I boxed the mirror and sent it to Evaporated Metal Films in New York. Total outlay was $135.00. While that was going on, I bought a spider and diagonal holder and then came the diagonal which I bought from Coulter Optical. That was another $50.00 or so for all of it. Once everything arrived, I had to build a tube and mount. Having access to the dump, I scrounged virtually everything except for fiberboard (pegboard without the holes). I had a friend that gave me a sheet of ¼” Teflon for my bearings and soon had an equatorial version of the telescope.

The tube was a design I used several times afterwards and works very well. I cut four 20” plywood rings with 16” holes. Then I strung them together with 4 each 1” x 2” boards. Then I wrapped the fiberboard around the framework. The mount was scrap 4” aluminum tubing. The bearings were 4” x 4” pine cut into pillow blocks. Within each bearing surface was a Teflon pad. The rest of the mount was 2” x 6” boards cut to various shapes. The counterweight was a block of cement.

The scope worked beautifully and total cost was around $250.00. Just tell me where you can get a 16” reflector for that much anywhere! The first light was in spring of 1987 at Incirlik AB in Turkey. I looked at the Orion nebula, the Pleades, and a host of other objects. Wow!

In 1988 we transferred back to Spain and I had to throw the whole telescope away except the critical parts and the Teflon. Why not? I made it for free anyway! Spain is where I made the first Dobson version of the scope. Once again, I scrounged the parts and spent a total of about $50.00 rebuilding it. It worked much better than the equatorial and could not be budged by the wind. Since I scrounged virtually everything, I had little choice in paint color. I ended up painting it blue and that is when it became Old Blue.

I used to leave the scope outside under a tarp and it held up pretty well for several years until we returned to the states and Altus Oklahoma. By that time the scope was becoming pretty long on the tooth. I finally broke down and rebuilt it. This time I refined the design in several places but the most significant refinement was to use fiberglass bathroom panels to wrap around the tube. This lightened it tremendously. In choosing a color, we had good ole' Wal-Mart available and my wife wanted it to be different. So we picked purple. I took this version of the scope to the Okie-Tex star party in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Steve Atkins, the president of the club at that time, dubbed it the “Barney” scope because it was purple just like Barney the dinosaur.

Since moving to Las Vegas, we lived in a one room studio and finally a one bedroom apartment. I had to leave the telescope shell in Indiana so it was necessary to rebuild it here in Las Vegas. This time I used Sonotube instead of my usual framework. I also learned a few other tricks and made the mount more portable. When I went to pick the color, I still had that old Wal-Mart color strip and thought I gave the guy the right shade when it was mixed. After painting the new scope, my wife looked at it and said it was not the same shade of purple as Barney. I thought the original color was English Rose, but apparently it was Wine something. So instead of naming this new version Barney 2, it is now called Rose.

If you want the most bang for your buck, have a little patience, and a minimal skill with woodworking, you can do this too. My lewd and crude scope sets up in a few minutes, takes little to align it (with Barney, I actually used to kick the back of the tube to align it!), and that's it! At any given star party, I have already observed ten or twelve objects by the time our fancy partners are still trying to adjust their mounts and get their tracking right. And when the wind picks up, guess who is still looking?

What have I seen with this beast? I've logged over 1400 different celestial objects since 1987. I have completed the Messier list several times over, and am working on the first Herschel 400 list. I just picked up the list of Caldwell objects and will add that to my quests, plus I have the second Herschel 400 list ready to go. I have seen every planet including Mercury and Pluto. I have seen many comets including Comet Hale Bopp, Comet Halley, Comet Hyakatuke, and Comet West (I think). I have done all this using a Tirion star atlas and a 25mm or 50mm finder scope. No computers, no GOTO, just star hopping. Oh, and no Telrad!

I am not in the least knocking the fancy equipment or the people who can afford to spend the bucks on commercial systems. But, if you are like me and have virtually no budget, do not let that stop you from pursuing this great hobby! Take heart, and take it from me, it's not an impossible dream!

If you have any questions, comments, or need more specific technical details, feel free to contact me. I would be glad to answer.