Saturday 17 October 2009

amateur observing - Astronomical telescope making

The first question anyone asks about a telescope is "what is the magnification?" It is almost always not the most important thing. Any telescope can magnify a million times, given a short enough eyepiece - the problem is, how good the image is.



For observing planets, the main thing is resolving power - the ability of the telescope to discern tiny details. The resolving power is limited by aperture, or the diameter of the primary lens or mirror. If the primary lens diameter is measured in mm, and the resolving power in arcseconds, then the limit is:



resolving power = 100 / aperture



Your 50 mm diameter lens would have a resolving power limited to 2 arcseconds in ideal conditions. Any details smaller than that would be blurry, no matter how much magnification you put into that thing. For comparison, Jupiter's apparent diameter is between 30 and 50 arcsec, Mars' between 3.5 and 25 arcsec, Saturn's between 14 and 20 (without the rings).



With that aperture you would see the rings of Saturn, and a couple equatorial belts on Jupiter. Venus shows a crescent when it's far from the Sun. Mars is a little orange disk when it's closest to Earth. I've looked at planets through 50 mm of aperture, and you can see quite a few things that way.



The Moon also looks interesting, you can see craters and mountains, plus it's available every month.




Because resolving power is limited by aperture, as you give it more and more magnification, at some point the image is just huge and bloated; big, but blurry. So there's a limit to the useful magnification - again, this depends on aperture. If the aperture is measured in mm, the formula is:



maximum magnification = 2 * aperture



Your 50 mm aperture would support up to 100x magnification before things get too blurry.



So how do you calculate magnification for a given instrument? It is the ratio between the focal length of the primary lens (or mirror) and the focal length of the eyepiece (the lens close to your eye):



M = F / f



For your 1000 mm focal length primary, you achieve 100x magnification with an eyepiece with 10 mm focal length. Anything shorter than that would just bloat the image uselessly. Eyepiece focal lengths that would make sense in your instrument would be between 10 mm and 120 mm.




Words of advice:



Make sure the lenses are perfectly aligned. When you build the instrument, have some way to adjust the direction of the primary lens, so as to align it with the main axis of the instrument. Some tweaking will be required - tilt the primary a fraction of mm, check the results, tilt again, repeat until the image looks best. This is called collimation and it's very important for the overall performance of the instrument.



Have some way for the eyepiece to move back and forth until you achieve perfect focus. This will have to be re-adjusted every time you observe. The adjustment is quite sensitive. A real focuser would help a lot, but this could be achieved also with two tubes sliding into each other, held in place by friction, like in an old pirate captain's telescope.



For astronomy, when the scope is focused at infinity, the distance between primary lens and eyepiece is the sum of their focal lengths. E.g. with a 1000 mm primary and a 10 mm eyepiece, the distance would be 1010 mm. This assumes a convergent eyepiece.



The telescope will not work well hand-held. The image will be jumping around too much. You will need some kind of mount. At the very least put the top of the tube on a fence or something. But astronomical instruments work best when they are on a rock solid mount. Even a broomstick hammered into the ground, with a loop on top for the tube, is better than nothing.



Whichever way you mount the primary lens, don't squeeze it too hard in the lens cell or tube. It will deform the lens and make the image bad. Some pressure on the edge is okay; lots and lots of pressure not okay. You could glue the edge of the lens on some kind of ring. Just use common sense.



This is totally doable. I've built a telescope just like that, many years ago. It's great to see what you can achieve on your own.



Good luck!

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