I'm really quite easy to assemble

A printed booklet is enclosed in the pack and I can be built in less than one hour! Well, I guess you maybe could assemble me without reading the instructions - it should only take about 10 times longer - especially if you have lots of experience building simple things like submarines, nuclear reactors, deep-space probes, medical-imaging gear and so on.

What follows here is just an extract from the complete instructions to give you a general idea of the stages

Assembling my Optic Tube

My optical tube holds the main mirror - my eye. This collects light from distant objects and turns it into an image that you can see. Because my eye is much bigger than yours I am able to collect much more light than you and with the help of my eyepieces I can produce an image for you that is magnified many times.

All the tools are supplied in the kit - a philips head screwdriver and two hex keys.

Sliding the 6 tube rods through the holes in my centre rings is easy, before attaching my main mirror. Then the focuser and my diagonal mirror are attached. My finderscope and bracket are then added.

The completed assembly will look like the picture

Assembling my Equatorial Mount

I need three legs (a tripod) to stand up properly and hold my Equatorial head that allows me to move in an arc across the sky keeping up with the rotation of the earth. It is the rotation of the earth that makes it look like the stars are moving.

Assembly is done by extend each of my tripod legs out to about half way, securing them and attaching my equatorial mount head to the top of my tripod legs. Then attach my accessory tray.

My long cable controls what is called the Declination Axis or DEC Axis and the short cable controls the Right Ascention Axis or RA Axis. Sliding my weight onto my weight rod and making a few simple adjustments is all that is left of this stage.

Putting my Optic Tube onto my Equatorial Mount

This is the most exciting bit to complete the job, when we attach my optical tube onto my equatorial mount. All the steps are clearly described in the printed instructions

Adjustments you can make later

Later you will learn how to balance and adjust everything to get a nice smooth movement in both the RA and DEC axes.

The angle of my RA axis must be adjusted to the angle of latitude of your position on earth eg, to the town or city you live in. You can find this out from an Atlas or local City Council. You do not need to be too fussy about this but you are actually setting up my RA Axis so that it is parallel to the Axis of the earth. This means that when you are locked in looking at a star or nebulae you will only need to turn my RA Axis cable to keep up with that object. You will be amazed to see just how fast the earth is spinning when you try and keep up with you want to look at. The higher the magnification you use the faster the object will move across you field of view. Bigger telescopes have expensive computer controlled motor drives to do this but we have to do it manually

Learning stuff

We do one complete revolution every 24 hours giving us night and day. We actually spin around at up to 1600 kilometres per hour!

The RA axis is the 24 hour axis which allows you control over the 1600 (or so) kilometre per hour rotation of the earth. Actually that 1600 kph is at the equator. The further you get away from the equator the speed drops so for example in Sydney Australia we might only be doing about 900 kph down to zero at the poles.

If you would like to do some experiments first - go to "cool stuff" on this website.

I am a Newtonian telescope - based on the orginal design by Issac Newton (you know - the guy who discovered gravity

My specifications:

Focal length 900 mm
Main mirror diameter 114 mm
5 X 24 Finderscope
K25 mm eyepiece gives 36 X magnification
K10 mm eyepiece gives 90 X magnification

The completed tube assembly

Colimation (adjusting the mirrors)

This might sound a bit hard, but it is actually easy and a real buzz when you get it right.

Collimation adjusts my two mirrors so that the light coming from whatever you are looking at hits my main mirror, is reflected back up my tube to hit my diagonal mirror, then reflected again at right angles out of the side of my tube straight up my focuser to form an image which you magnify by looking through my eyepiece.

Once again, the printed instructions with my kit of parts describes the adjustments in detail. As a bit of an outline, you adjust my diagonal mirror and also my main mirror by loosening and tightening a few screws - nothing too tricky.

When you feel happy with your adjustments, point me at something outside about 200metre away. A tree or a house, whatever. Put my K25 eyepiece into my focuser and adjust my focuser until you get an image. You should get a nice clear image although it will be upside down (that is nature of a Newtonian telescope. I am not meant for day time viewing. You need a spotting scope for that). Anyway if you are getting a clear image now then you have done very well.

Getting a pin point star image at night is your last goal. Star images are the ultimate test of collimation - they are so far away that even through the biggest telescopes on earth you will only ever see a single point of light.

THAT'S IT ! YOU HAVE NOW BUILT YOURSELF A TELESCOPE . ITS ME, HUGO AT YOUR SERVICE !

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