Starting Small

So I think I am going to start by building a 4.5" F8 small dob. The primary & Secondary will cost me about $53 (USD) with shipping plus any customs. I sent an email to the customs service to see how much that will be.

The next thing to decide is do I want to make it a solid sonotube or some sort of truss travel scope. I am looking around talpiot for sonotube, and will try to see how much it goes for. From there I can decide if I want to lug the scope around in 1 piece or not. I'm thinking with this one a solid tube makes sense.

Finding optics

I have found these 3 companies that sell telescope mirrors on the low end.

• Anttlers Optics
• Hands On Optics
  
• Meridian Telescopes

Meridian has a 4.25" F8 mirror for about $32, which would be about $40 with shipping. This also includes a secondary mirror. It would make a decent long tube for a narrow field of view.

A 6" F5 mirror seems to be about $80. This would make a nice wide field scope. including a spider and mirror cell it would run me about $150.

If I want to go larger then I found a 12" F4.5 with secondary for about $399. It would need a mirror cell and a bunch of other stuff. This is a plan for the future.

I think for now the 6" rich field scope makes the most sense.

rebuilding a telescope

So I have this telescope. Its a meade short tube reflector. Which is to say that it has a spherical primary (bad) which is probably about F4 or F4.5. It also had a bad finder which is now broken and a crappy focuser and mount. So I'm going to rebuild it a piece at a time, until I have a scope that I like. First step is a new finder scope and a crayford focuser. The new finder is a 9x50 from Orion and the focuser is from the same source.

Next step is to rebuild the mount into something better for this there are 3 options:

1. A standard dob. maybe a travel dob. Basic alt/az platform scope, nothing fancy but will be easy to build.
2. A Equatorial mount. I have seen plans for some that use a wood disk for a drive wheel. My cousin in Hod Hasharon is a wood worker with a lathe so if he can help me this would be an option. This would require a motor that can be adjusted to allow it to track the sky. The major advantage here is that i could use this for piggyback photgraphy.
3. A Trackball. This would involve mounting the mirror in a sphere such that the scope could turn any way. It would therefore be possible to have a polar drive motor to track the sky, but it probably would not be possible to balance it to do photography.
   

If I go with 1 or 2 I may get a palm pilot or the like and hook up a mouse or two to act as an encoder to be a setting circle. This would allow me to know exactly where my scope is pointing and allow me to find object quite easily. On the other hand I'm not sure I want all that complexity, and of course there is the trunk space issue (my car is quite small)