Section 3.1. Hacks 3343


3.1. Hacks 3343

Hacking is a time-honored custom in amateur astronomy. When Robert started observing in the mid-60s, most people built their own scopes. As a teenager, Robert couldn't afford a commercial scope, so he did what thousands of others did: bought a mirror kit from Edmund Scientific and ground his own 6" mirror, built a finder scope from half of a discarded binocular, assembled an equatorial mount from pipe fittings, and scrounged far and wide for parts to build the mirror cell, focuser, and so on.

Life is easier for amateur astronomers nowadays. In 2000, when Robert decided to jump back into amateur astronomy, someone gave him a catalog from Orion Telescope & Binocular Center (http://www.telescope.com). Flipping through it, he spotted a 10" SkyQuest XT10 Dobsonian telescope for only $699. It certainly looked odd to Robert, whose idea of a scope was a tube sitting on a tripod. This one was a tube sitting in what looked like a large box on the ground. OK, so things had changed. But $700 for a complete 10" scope? It must be a piece of junk, right?

Wrong. More Internet searching turned up a lot of answers. The telescope sold by Orion as the SkyQuest XT10 was actually made in Taiwan by a company named Guan Sheng, which mass-produces telescopes of astonishingly good quality at surprisingly low prices. The mechanicalsmirror cell, focuser, and so onwere much better than what Robert had made himself in the 60s, and the optics were, if not quite up to the best premium custom optics, probably better than Robert could have produced himself. Make or buy? The decision was a no-brainer. We ordered an Orion SkyQuest XT10 Dob and have never looked back. (Nowadays, you can buy a very similar 10" Dob for about $500.)

Dobsonian scopes are simple, intuitive to use, have rock-solid mounts, and provide much more aperture for the money than any other type of scope. It's no wonder that Dobs are overwhelmingly popular nowadays. But we think there's another factor.

If you buy a refractor, SCT, or other traditional scope, you've bought a scope. You unpack and assemble it, set it up, and use it. Sure, you can buy more eyepieces and other accessories. Perhaps you can adjust the focuser or tweak the mount a bit, but that's about it. There's not much you can (or should) do to modify the scope itself. If you attend a large star party, you'll see dozens of scopes set up. Every SCT or refractor looks pretty much like every other. There's not much opportunity for personalization or customization.

If you buy a Dobsonian scope, you've bought an ongoing project, or atleast the opportunity for one. Although most Dobs work pretty well without any modifications, their inherent simplicity makes it easy to customize them. Dobs appeal to the shade-tree mechanic in all of us. We tweak, modify, upgrade, improve, and tinker with our Dobs. We build new bases, upgrade the bearings, paint the tubes, install cooling fans, replace the mirror cells and focusers, flock the tubes, and on and on. In short, we hack on them.

It's not that a typical Dob actually needs all this work, you understand. It's that the simplicity of a Dob allowsyou to make these changes, and each change makes the scope more and more your own personalized instrument. Some Dob owners modify their scopes so heavily that they are no longer recognizable as the commercial telescope that was the starting point.

So, although some of the hacks in this chapter also pertain to other scope types, we focus our efforts on the most important tweaks and upgrades for Dobsonian scopes.



    Astronomy Hacks
    Astronomy Hacks: Tips and Tools for Observing the Night Sky
    ISBN: 0596100604
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 112

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