It all started with taking my mom's Kodak browine camera apart and putting it back together over and over again. Like a true engineer, I had to know how it worked, what was the magic. Soon I'd taken my dad's 35mm Argus C4 apart and gotten that back together again. I was on my way ( it was about that time that my dad figured he'd upgrade to a Minolta SRT-101 ).

The first telescope I made used the closeup lens adapter from my mom's Kodak brownie, a bellows from an enlarger, a long piece of furnace duct, lots of black paint, and my dad's Minolta as the film holder. It had a focal length of about 2 meters, but was about F72. Only good for images of the sun setting on a road about 2 miles away.

Then a few years ago, mom got me a $25 Tasco telescope kit from a yard sale. You could kinda see Saturn's rings, and the bands of Jupiter, but not much else. It did have a solar filter, and watching sunspots was cool.

Then one of my engineers let me borrow his Orion 80mm refractor for a weekend. I hooked it up to my CoolPix 950 and got some pictures of the mooon. Very cool. Then I looked at Saturn and Juptiter. Nothing like what I remembered

My usual rig ( without the wedge ) July 2005.

A closeup of the HyperStar lens with the Meade DSI July 2005.

A lashup to mount a 3com webcam lens on a Meade DSI CCD camera. July 2005.

Of course there is no clearance on the back of the webcam lens, so I had to move the IR blocking filter to the front (yuck). July 2005.

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Copyright © 2006 by Bennet Blake
Last fiddeled with 26-Sep-06