How to make a telescope at home

2024 Author: Sierra Becker | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-26 03:47

Everyone probably wanted to assemble their own telescope from improvised materials in their childhood, but somehow their hands never reached … How to make a telescope yourself? Yes, it’s very simple, because now there are many schemes for amateur telescopes of a wide variety of designs.

For starters, we need an ordinary paper sheet. First of all, you need to paint one of the sides of the sheet black - it will be inside. Painting is needed so that it is dark inside the telescope tube, which will become a folded drawing paper, otherwise you will see a rather cloudy image in the eyepiece and you are unlikely to find the answer to the question “how to make a telescope”. Yes, by the way, the length of the Whatman sheet should be about 1 meter - this is the focal length that is ideal for a homemade telescope.

So, the tube of the future telescope is ready. Now you need to find a lens for the lens. For a device with a focal length of a meter, glass with a diopter of +1 is suitable. What's good is that these lenses are sold in any optical store at a bargain price, so you can even buy spare lenses.

Next in the action plan called "How to make a telescope" is the next item - fixing the lens. The lens is attached to one end of your telescope withcardboard rings and tape. There is an option with fixing the glass with electrical tape, but it is not always suitable. When you have firmly connected the lens to the telescope, you can proceed to the next step.

To completely forget about the haze of the image, you also need to make a diaphragm. This is the name of a small cardboard circle with a hole in the middle. It is possible to set the aperture both behind the lens and in front of it - this will not affect the final result.

In any case, experiments are welcome, so perhaps your model of a reflector can become an illustration for the book How to Make a Telescope.

If you are not an experimenter at all, then you can look for tables of correspondence between lens sizes and aperture diameters in apertures.

For example, a 40mm aperture is enough for a 70mm lens.

Next, you need to find a good eyepiece, because it is through this glass that you will look.

In specialized stores, small eyepiece glasses are quite expensive - up to 1.5 thousand rubles apiece. But we are not interested in the question “how to make a telescope at a high price”, we, on the contrary, want to save money. That is why you can forget about shopping.

Even the glass from the binoculars that you played with as a child is suitable for an eyepiece. It is important that this is glass and not a piece of plastic, because plastic makes the image hazy.

The eyepiece is fixed at the end of the second,a small pipe, using the same cardboard rings and adhesive tape. You can also use plastic corks and lids from cans of chips. Why do we connect a small pipe with a large one in such a way that we don’t get a static structure - after all, we may need to focus. That is why you need to make the diameter of the small pipe slightly smaller than the diameter of the large one.

Manufacturing a tripod is optional - you can even use a stack of books under a tripod, since a homemade telescope does not have to be fixed statically, because it gives a rather small magnification, which means that the picture will not shake.

So you have learned how to make a reflecting telescope at home with a minimum of costs!