Visit to Stellafane Telescope Making Convention

This is a yearly telescope making convention called Stellafane. It is located in Springfield Vermont. An amazing group of amateur astronomers who are passionate about Telescope making. They have some world famous amateur telescopes.
More stuff on my website: http://www.telescopenerd.com
and their website: http://stellafane.org

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Stellafane
• telescope making
• telescopes
• Dobsonian

[bartapian4]

Wow, how much would it cost to build the 16inch one we see in the video ?

[epicfantasy]

@bartapian4 I am not sure , that man was a master craftsman, he even ground the lenses himself. he said it was a group effort, some of the mount parts with simple plumbing pipes, was amazing.

[Aresftfun]

8 inch in diameter or radius?

[epicfantasy]

@Aresftfun There was a telescope there with a 32 inch diameter! Lot of telescopes in the range of 10-16 inches in diameter.

[MJFAN666]

Can you please link me to the videos where you make these?

[stumpythumper]

Meteor Shower this Weds!

I hope there's no clouds:)

[skyscraperjim]

@bartapian4 The 16-inch Cassegrain was built by Dick Parker. It was one of a pair of similar scopes built by him and Al Hall. It took them 6 and a half years to build. Every couple of months during the duration of construction, Al would bring some of the parts of his scope and mount to Skyscrapers meetings to show the progress. The cost of the materials is pretty small compared to the time put into a project of this scale.

[rockriver9]

I like how the guy in the orange shirt says 'anybody can build this'. He's never met me....lol But, kidding aside, I'm sure they make these kits easy enough so that anyone can enjoy it---which is really super cool. Loved this video---you do some pretty darn cool stuff!! Thanks for the video!

[T1m3Trav3l3r]

This brings back memories. I was there in the mid 80s. I was always into astronomy, and a couple of friends asked me to go there. I didn't know it existed before that. I had a 10" reflector, but had to sell it. I still have a Celestron 4.5". I've never seen the Milky Way and such clear skies before I went there. I grew up in Jersey. A lot of light pollution. We had an astronomy club at the college, and the observatory had a 10-inch f/15 refractor and a 24-inch f/11 Cassegrain reflector.

[foreilly1958]

The yelloow telescope has a mirror of 8 inch diameter, 48 inch focal length, thereby making it an f/6

[foreilly1958]

The sixteen inch f/17 classical Cassegrain was made by Dick Parker of Tolland CT. Dick is a master telescope maker. He made the telescope in tandem with Allen Hall,who also made one. Both tied for first place in all categories they entered at Stellafab]ne in 2008. The parts were all machined in their basements. Between making the tooling and the actual telescope, they each invested about six years of spare time. The material cost is well into the tens of thousands, each. You could not buy this.

[ialarmu]

This stuff is soooo cool!!!!!!!!!