Completed Projects

I found this scope in a pile on Craigslist in July 2020. I had to do a lot of work cleaning the tube, partially re-finishing the tripod legs and lubricating the mount among other things. The scope was a bit unwieldy and I'm not a huge refractor fan, so I ended up selling it to my friend Barry Butler.

This was my first homemade telescope, and the only one with a homemade mirror.. I ground and polished the mirror myself in August 2017 when I was 14 years old. The mirror is very good, but none of the structures I threw it in were anything resembling decent - though it did win 1st place Junior award at Stellafane 2018.

I had a lot of good views with it, but as of now the mirror sits in a drawer awaiting use in some sort of travel telescope. You can read about it here on Cloudy Nights. This scope made it into Sky & Telescope in September 2018. The second incarnation of the structure made it into TIME, The Guardian, and National Geographic.

This telescope was built in November 2018 with John Robert at Rippowam Labs. It is in the hands of a kid who was supposed to build it with us but elected not to participate very much during the process, so John and I more or less built it for him.

We built a second 6" f/8 Dob at Rippowam Labs back in 2018. Originally it was supposed to be made by a student but they quit, leaving us with a pile of parts that we decided to use. A lot more of the work was done by Ron Morse, who now owns the scope and has made a lot of modifications to it, including improved bearings, a cooling system, custom caps and a work-in-progress equatorial mount. You can sometimes see this scope in downtown Stamford when we do sidewalk astronomy events.

A scope I restored with the help of Dana Weisbrot, who painted the tube and finder while I did the rest.

This scope came to me in incredibly bad shape, with dirty optics, a non-functional clock drive and ruined paint. I restored it to perfect condition in 2019 and repainted it with the help of Dana Weisbrot of Twin Ridge Auto Body (and fellow WAS member). The scope now resides in the hands of Gianluca Carlinci in Italy, along with a 1971 C8 which I also sold to him that awaits a similar restoration.

This poorly-constructed instrument was my third homemade scope, made in the summer of 2018. It had a lot of mechanical issues for most of its existence and was originally made for a friend, who actually rejected it when it was presented (understandably so). Nonetheless the Coulter primary mirror gave me some excellent views of Mars.

A scope I restored for the Westport Astronomical Society with the help of Dana Weisbrot. Dana tackled the hardware and OTA while I cleaned the optics and legs. The scope works well and provies beautiful images despite its age.

I got this from a friend of a friend, and it was in beautiful condition but I went ahead and oiled the legs. Dave Trott finished the restoration job and it can be viewed on YouTube.

I was gifted this at Stellafane and made a few improvements such as additional handles, flocking and adding some stickers. It is a very good scope with optics made by John and his son Julian in the 1990s. I use it primarily for outreach but it is a great visual instrument when I am stuck without a bigger scope.

This scope was given to me by Pierre's sister. I cleaned it up, replaced a few parts, and gave it to my friend Sadie. It has great optics.

I was given this along with the aforementioned 10" and a 12" and 14" which had to be scrapped for parts (don't worry, the mirrors are ok and in use!) The mirror needed a recoat and I gave it to my mail carrier in Connecticut before I moved to Tucson.

This scope was built in early 2020 using a mirror made by Logan Nicholson of Melbourne, Australia. Unlike all of my other homemade telescopes, this one was an equatorially mounted rather than a Dobsonian, mostly because the stubby 30" long tube was too short for a true Dobsonian mounting while at the same time the immense 29-pound weight meant it would be far too heavy for a tabletop telescope. I used an aluminum tube from Hastings Irrigation and a mirror cell from Orion Optics UK, and mounted the scope on an old Celestron ASGT. While it worked very well, the equatorial configuration frequently put the telescope's eyepiece in rather irritating positions, and the total assembly weighed 120 pounds. I ended up ditching the scope for my 14.7" f/2.9.

You can view the build thread on Cloudy Nights here.

I got this telescope for a very low price because it had a broken corrector plate. I then managed to find a corrector plate for $100. Normally you're not supposed to replace correctors due to the way they are optically matched to primary/secondary mirrors, but for a relatively small investment I decided to give it a shot. Somehow the corrector matched pretty well, and after lots of tweaking and rotating I got it aligned perfectly and the scope gives fantastic images even at 600x. I estimate the system to be about 1/8 wave overall. I used this set up as a backyard observatory under a TeleGizmos cover for a while, but once I got my driver's license I opted to go back to using Dobsonians and a smaller C9.25. It is currently in the hands of my friend Steve McDaniel.

Another Stellar Vision find, this needed a new base and finder along with cleaning. My friend Leslie uses it for her own viewing and outreach, and her girlfriend helped with the new paintjob.