Customer Reviews

Advanced Telescope Making Techniques

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This book is an compilation of articles from the newsletter "Maksutov Circulars", a telescope building organization dedicated originally to building Maksutov telscopes, an original, creative idea for telescope design largely fallen out of favor due to it's overly complex design relative to its (marginal) advantages over more conventional designs. The extremely popular Schmidt-Cassegrain has long eclipsed the Maksutov in practicality and volume.

This book was very disappointing. I bought the book because I was interested in telescope mounts. Volume 1 is about "Optics". So, I thought this one, "Volume 2 Mechanical", would have info about telescope mounts. However, the majority of the book deals with the mechanics... OF OPTICS !!

For example, a whole lot of articles are spent explaining how to make various grinding machines for mirrors. Only a very few articles deal with mounts. There are 10 chapters, the first 6 deal with the mechanics of optics, and there is a chapter each on photography and your home workshop. There is precisely one chapter on "Telescope Construction" which has 12 articles: 4 on fiberglass telescope tubes, and one each on polar alignment, collimation, baffling, and making a telescope tube. The remaining 4 articles are almost as useless. The one relevant article dealt with clock drives on a permanent mount. Very few amateurs have the luxury of a permanent observatory.

If you want to learn about grinding mirrors, this has a lot of info. If you want to let someone else do the grunge work, save your money and buy a different book.

A more modern approach, and very well-written, is a new book, "The Dobsonian Telescope: A Practical Manual for Building Large Aperture Telescope", by Dave Kriege, owner of Obsession Telescopes, and Dave Berry, long-time telescope making author.