

Telescope Making [video] - gosub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYpjlQpsANY

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imroot
This is something that I am really passionate about.

I have a farm in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky, that I've put a glass
studio in part of the unfinished side of my pole barn (I use the other side
for electronics assembly, testing, and debugging) that I use for casting the
blanks for grinding the mirrors.

I use a High Def projector and a 12MP DSLR camera to identify parts of the
mirror that need to be ground down more and then ultimately verify that the
curvature of the glass is correct.

There's an observatory about 200 miles away near Columbus, Ohio that can
mirrorize the glass (it's a 3 day process), and I usually donate my last
telescope to the observatory for letting me use their equipment (and I bring
my own supplies).

I've attempted to make my own lenses, but, there's just too much room for
error in that process.

Once I have the mirrors and lenses correctly, I've been playing around with
NEMA-34 stepper motors and kflop/kstep motor controllers to power my polar
object tracking -- there are usually two buttons on the telescope that I use
-- one for releasing the steppers and the other for energizing and starting to
track -- along with encoders so that I can get an approximation of the night
sky.

I love living in the middle of nowhere, in Kentucky for the stars, and my
ability to do unique farm tech (temperature and water quality sensors using
raspberry pi's and mesh networking, GPS and yield sensors on my tractors,
solar powered wifi repeaters to my 'city home' for fast internet).

