Priceless Paintings from W7

The talk about the Hubble and Herschel space telescopes brought one of those crazy science project ideas out of the distant back of my brain back into the conscious part: to build my own telescope.

Not quite like this guy’s home-made 737mm reflector telescope, but something smaller, cheaper, and not as good. I’d still like to see if and how it works, so here’s the idea:

Take a 180..250mm parabolic mirror – a shaving mirror comes to mind. Determine its focal length (one quick experiment with one randomly chosen mirror gave approximately 700mm). Take a black plastic tube (drainage pipe?) of 1 1/2 that length, stick the mirror on one end, and a CCD module into the focal point, done. Possible use a small square mirror in the focal point, redirecting the beam to the camera mounted on the side.

I presume those mirrors aren’t really made to astronomical precision, so the resulting image would, if anything, be fuzzy, but it’s a start, is it not?

Once the principle is confirmed, take the mirror, mount it on a low-speed eccentric drive, pour a few drops of polishing fluid into it, add a handful of steel balls, and let this thing run for a month or so, thereby improving the mirror. A 33rpm turntable comes to mind.

Meanwhile, I could wake up and find my sanity again, but until this happens, I am still inclined to give it a go. It’s tempting, don’t you think?

Thoughts, Web/Tech astronomy