ULTRA-SIMPLE TELESCOPE

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MAKE A BEGINNER'S TELESCOPE

A telescope with a tube is nice, but it's more complicated than necessary. A telescope
with adjustable focus is useful, but it's hard to build. A project that's too complex and  
difficult will drive people away, when the goal is to tempt them into building it. 

Here is an extremely easy version of a Telescope Build-it project. No cardboard tube

or adjustable focus mechanism is required. All that you need is a pair of lenses.
Tempting? 

THE LENSES
Two lenses are needed to build a telescope. We call these the "objective" lens and
the "eyepiece" lens.
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OBJECTIVE EYEPIECE
LENS: LENS:
* large * small
 * weak * powerful
* convex only * convex OR concave
The "Objective" lens should always be a convex lens. Convex lenses are thicker in
the middle, and can be used as magnifying glasses or for concentrating sunlight. Try
to find one which is large and weak. The weaker it is, the more powerful your
telescope will be. The thinner it is in the center, the weaker it is.
_______
_-- --_
<_ _> Side view of convex lens
--_______--

___----___
_/ \_
/______________\ This type of convex lens also will work

The "eyepiece" lens can be either a convex or concave lens. If you use a convex
eyepiece, your telescope will turn everything upside-down. This kind of telescope is
called a "Newtonian." And if you use a concave lens as your eyepiece, your
telescope will not turn things upside-down. This type of scope is called a "Galilean." 

For your eyepiece, try to find a lens which is small and powerful. A small, powerful
magnifying loupe makes a good telescope eyepiece.

|\_ _/|
| ----_____---- |
| _____ | Powerful concave lens.
| _---- ----_ |
|/ \|

_ _
| ---_________--- |
| _________ | Weak concave lens.
|_--- ---_|

You can buy cheap lenses from the suppliers below. 

USING YOUR TELESCOPE

Face a distant, well-lighted object such as a lamp, or distant trees outdoors. 

Hold your Eyepiece Lens right on your eye and look through it. It's OK to close your
other eye. 
Hold your Objective lens right in front of your eyepiece. 

Slowly move your Objective lens forward until the scene comes into focus.
Sometimes it's hard to find the right distance, so try many different places. Look
through your lenses and find the blurry edge of trees or lightbulb, then move the
objective lens in or out so that the blurry edge looks sharper. 

Your lenses are now a telescope! 

Now that you know the trick, you can make a telescope whenever you find two
different lenses lying around. If a friend happens to have two magnifying glasses,
grab them, put the more powerful one right on your eye, move the other in and out,
and you'll have an instant telescope. 

HOW TELESCOPES WORK

I've read many different explanations of telescopes. Most of them are confusing and
complicated. Some are even wrong. So, if you read an explanation and don't
understand it, don't blame yourself. Blame the author of the book or encyclopedia for
not being a good explainer! 

Having said this, do I think I can do better? I don't know. A good explanation of a
telescope should be easy to understand. I've never seen a really good one, so all I can
do is try to explain things in a different way than books usually do, and see how well
it works. 

  MY SIMPLE EXPLANATION:
If you put a lens right on your eye, it makes things blurry,
but it does not magnify distant scenes. This is how
eyeglasses work. They change the blurry-ness or sharpness
of what you see, but they don't act as magnifiers when used
normally. 

Now if you move a lens away from your eye, and keep
looking through it, everything WILL change size. If the lens
is concave (thinner in the center,) everything you see in the
 lens will get smaller and smaller as you move the lens
farther away from your eye. If you use a convex lens instead,
everything will get bigger and bigger as you move it away. 

The convex lens is the interesting one because it makes

things bigger when you move it farther from your eye. Keep
moving it farther and farther away. You'll find that
everything will become VERY big, even infinitely big. And
infinitely blurry too. Move the lens a little farther, and things
get small again, but now everything seen through the lens is
upside-down. 

By moving the convex lens in and out, we can change the

size of everything, or make it all go upside-down or
rightside-up. Unfortunately everything is very blurry when
you're looking through the lens. If only there was some way
to remove the blurryness, we could hold a convex lens in
front of our eye and use it to magnify distant scenes. 

There is a way to remove the blur: wear glasses! Glasses are

used to correct blurry vision, and they can fix this blur too.
Put another lens right upon your eye. It acts like eyeglasses
and makes the image sharp. If you do this, you have
constructed a telescope. The objective lens creates a
magnified view of distant objects, while the eyepiece lens
removes the blur. That's how telescopes work. 

MAKE A TELESCOPE USING JUST ONE LENS

Here's an interesting question. If human beings could focus their eyes better, could we build
telescopes with only one lens? Suppose you were able to focus your eyes on an object that was
1/10 inch away from your eye. Couldn't you hold an "objective" lens a few inches away, look
through it, then focus really hard with your eyes and create a telescope? The answer is yes! 

Even if you don't have a superhuman ability to overfocus your

eyes, you can still make a simple one-lens telescope. Here's
how. Hold a weak convex lens in front of your eye. Close your
other eye. Move the lens far away so that everything turns
upside-down. Move the lens a bit closer so that everything stays
upside-down, but gets bigger and blurry. Now focus your eyes
really hard by crossing them. (This might take a bit of practice!
Crossing your eyes while one eye is closed is not that easy to
do.) 
The image you see in the lens will become sharper. If it doesn't
become completely sharp, then move the lens farther away. Also
try moving the lens closer while focusing really, REALLY hard.
Everything you see in the lens will be clear, sharp, and
magnified! You have made a telescope with nothing but a single
lens! Tell your friends about it and they won't believe you. Then
show them the trick and they'll be amazed. 

MAKE A TELESCOPE WITH A LENS AND SOME FOIL

It is also possible to make a telescope using aluminum foil and one lens. The lens will act as the
telescope's objective lens. To make an eyepiece, we just poke a tiny hole in the foil, and use this
pinhole as the telescope eyepiece lens. The tiny hole in the foil removes the blur. But it also
makes the image very dim. That's alright, just use this telescope to watch a bright outdoor scene. 

To make a good pinhole, stack up several layers of aluminum

foil, poke the stack with a pin, then separate the layers and
choose whichever one has a very round, very small hole.
Experiment with different holes; put one on your eye, look
through it a brightly-lit scene, and see how sharp everything
looks. Smaller holes generally give sharper, dimmer images, but
VERY small holes cause blur because of "optical diffraction"
effects. You want your pinhole to be very small, but not so small
that things become blurry. 
To make a telescope, hold the best pinhole against your eye and
look through it. Look at a brightly lit scene, such as the sunny
outdoors outside a classroom window. Now place your objective
lens against the pinhole, then move it slowly outwards. When
you see a magnified scene, your telescope is working! You can
hold your lens in different spots so the scene is either upside
down or right side up. 
An aluminum foil pinhole can be made sturdier by using rubber
cement to glue it to a piece of cardboard which has a 1cm hole
punched in the center (don't get cement in the tiny pinhole
though!) 
You can use your pinhole-telescope to create a "zoom lens"
effect by moving the objective lens towards the pinhole or away.
And depending on the distance between the pinhole and the lens,
the scene you see can either be upside-down or right-side-up. It's
very complicated to build a zoom-lens telescope with real
eyepiece lenses, but if you use a pinhole it becomes simple. 
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HOW TO BUILD A

TELESCOPE
G. Carboni, March 1996
English version revised by David P. Adam

INTRODUCTION
I describe below how to construct two telescopes. The first one is simpler to build, but is important for
understanding the solutions adopted in the second one, which is perfected and optimized for
astronomical observations.

THE FIRST TELESCOPE

As I said, you can build this first simple instrument without difficulty while allowing you to learn the
structure and operation of telescopes in general. Although it is simple, it can reveal the craters of the
Moon and the satellites of Jupiter. It is also very useful for demonstrating lens aberrations. You really
need to build this telescope as a necessary step towards understanding the solutions employed in the
second and improved telescope model. In the section "From Lenses to Optical Instruments", you saw
how a telescope works; here I simply remind you that the objective lens produces an image of the
object observed, and this image is magnified by the eyepiece.

Figures 2 and 3 show our first telescope, which is made using easy-to-find materials. The components
of this instruments are:

1 - ring to secure the eyepiece lens from behind

2 - ring for centering the eyepiece lens
3 - eyepiece: lens with focal length of 20-50 mm. You can buy one in an optical or photographic shop,
or you can get one free by using the lens of a disposable camera.
4 - ring to secure the eyepiece lens from the front
5 - a cardboard tube for the eyepiece. You can use the tube from a roll of plastic food wrap or paper
towels. You can also use short sections of this tube to make rings 1, 2, and 4 which you need to hold
the eyepiece lens in place
6 - coupling between the eyepiece tube and the main tube. This is a hollow cylinder with an outer
diameter that fits snugly into the end of the main tube and an inner diameter that provides a snug but
movable fit to the outside of the eyepiece tube. You can make the coupling using several plywood
disks glued together or using a polystyrene cylinder with a hole bored through it. If you use
polystyrene, you will need to add an opaque covering at each end.
7 - main tube. Use a cardboard or plastic tube about as long as the focal length of the objective lens
and with an outside diameter of 50-60 mm about. Suitable sources include map mailing tubes and
core tubes for carpets, drawing paper, or wrapping paper.
8 - objective lens. You can use a common eyeglass lens with a focal length of 500-1000 mm. You can
buy it in a optical shop. Ask the optician to reduce the lens diameter in order to fit it precisely into the
tube cap
9 - diaphragm. Cut it from a black card, then open a hole of about 15 mm in diameter in the center of
the disk
10 - Cap of the tube. If you buy a tube for drawing sheets, you should have a cap which will be useful
for retaining the objective and the diaphragm. Otherwise, you can made it with a disk of cardboard.
Make a series of radial cuts around the edge of the disk to make a set of tabs, Moisten the tabs; then
place the tube cap on one end of the principal tube and bend the tabs around the outside of the tube.
Glue the tabs together where they overlap, but be careful not to glue the cap to the principal tube yet.
When the glue is dry, slip the cap off and cut in the cap a hole a few mm less in diameter than the
outside diameter of principal tube.

Figure 3 - The components of the first telescope

(the eyepiece is in the little tube)

The distance between objective and eyepiece lenses must be equal to the sum of their focal lengths.
The eyepiece tube must stick out a few centimeters so you can move it to focus the telescope. Make
the length of the principal tube short enough to allow you to grip the protruding part of the eyepiece
tube with your fingers as you adjust the focus.
The eyepiece tube must slide smoothly in its channel, but it should not be loose enough to fall out if
you hold the telescope vertically. Paint the inside of the tubes with black opaque paint (matte finish)
or India ink . Secure the cap of the main tube to keep it from pulling away from the tube.

HOW TO USE THE FIRST TELESCOPE

 Do not use the diaphragm at
first, but leave the objective at
the greatest aperture. Point the
instrument towards a distant
object. Move forward and
backward the eyepiece tube
until the image is as distinct as
possible. You will soon realize
that the image is of poor quality
and is never distinct. This simple
objective lens has many defects
that produce the poor-quality
image.

You can reduce some aberrations by

decreasing the lens aperture. This is
why we use a diaphragm on the
objective. It is a round disk of black
stiff paper with a 15-mm-diameter
hole in the center. This diaphragm,
placed in front the objective,
reduces both the effects of the lens
defects and the brightness of the
image. As a consequence, you can
only observe objects brightly
illuminated by the Sun. To minimize
the chromatic aberrations, you will
need to replace the spectacle lens
you used as the objective for your
first telescope with an achromatic
lens, as we shall see below.

THE SUPPORT OF THE TELESCOPE

As soon as you use your telescope, you will see that you cannot hold it steadily enough in your hands
to maintain a stable image. You will need to build a support (fig. 2) to help you to point your
instrument and keep it steady. You can mount this support on a photographic tripod by means of a
1/4 W threaded hole.

LENS ABERRATIONS
The first telescope will give you a good feel for lens aberrations (fig. 3). In this simple instrument,
chromatic aberration is the most conspicuous. The aberrations can be greatly reduced by means of
careful lens design. As it is not possible to limit all kinds of aberrations using only a single lens,
objectives and eyepieces are created using multiple lenses. By selecting different types of glass for the
various lenses and using appropriate surface curvatures and distances between lenses, it is possible to
control in a satisfactory manner the aberration of the system. In general, the success of an objective
or an eyepiece in correcting aberrations depends on the number of lenses used to make it.
For the second telescope, shown in figure 10, we use an achromatic objective, made up of two
lenses of different shapes, one converging and the other diverging. Sometimes they are glued
together by means of Canada Balsam or a synthetic resin (cemented doublet), other times they are
kept separated (air-spaced doublet). These two lenses have different indices of refraction, one high
(Flint glass), and the other low (Crown glass). Hence, the chromatic aberrations of the two lenses act
in opposite senses, and tend to cancel each other out, thus producing a much more distinct image
than a single lens could achieve.

Usually, these objectives are constructed to reduce other types of aberration as well. Obviously,
achromatic objectives vary in quality. In some of them, it is still possible to perceive a residual
chromatic aberration, or the images they produce are well focused in the center only, or they produce
a pincushion or barrel distortion. Figure 3 describes the main optical aberrations.

EYEPIECES
In our first telescope, we used a simple magnifying glass as the eyepiece. Also eyepieces made up of a
single lens are affected by several aberrations, particularly chromatic, and with a single lens it is not
possible to eliminate them. In the early 1700s, Huygens showed that he could eliminate chromatic
aberration in an eyepiece using a system of two lenses. Since then, many eyepiece models have been
designed to obtain better and better corrections, a wider field corner, etc. However, eyepieces always
retain the same basic function of magnifying the real image formed by the objective. The main
parameters that characterize an eyepiece are the following:

Parameter Defines

MODEL Aberration corrections

FOCAL Focal lengths combine to determine the magnification power of the telescope

Determines how wide the image appears to the eye. A wider field makes the
FIELD
telescope more comfortable to use

EYE RELIEF or
Indicates the proper distance from the eye to the eyepiece lens
EYE DISTANCE

Indicates the outside diameter of the eyepiece tube. Most eyepieces have
DIAMETER
diameters of either ~24 mm or ~32 mm
In addition to those shown in figure 4, other types of eyepieces can be made by using more lenses.
Such fancy lenses are made for special purposes, and they are usually expensive.
 PRODUCING AN UPRIGHT IMAGE

With the first telescope you

built, images were inverted, and
in the section "From Lenses to
Optical Instruments" I explained
why. But astronomers don't
really care whether they see
star images "straight up" or
"upside down." In fact, with the
exception of the Sun, all stars
are so distant that not even with
the most powerful telescopes
has anyone ever seen their
disks. They appear to us always
as points of light, and to see a
point of light upright or
overturned does not make any
difference. However, many
people would like to use their
telescopes for terrestrial
observations, in which case
"right side up" does make a
difference.

Several different methods allows you to erecting images without significantly degrading their quality.
Figures 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 show the main erecting systems. These optical devices are sold with a case and
tubes for connecting them with the eyepieces and the focusing systems.
 

 
 
 

AN ACHROMATIC TELESCOPE
During the construction of this second telescope (fig. 10), we will use improved technology and
manufacturing methods to achieve better performance than we could get from our simple first
telescope. To build this instrument, you will need: - an achromatic objective with a diameter between
40 and 100 mm, and with a focal length between 600 and 1200 mm 
- an eyepiece with a focal length between 20 and 40 mm. Any model show in figure 4 is good, with
the exception of the Ramsden eyepiece 
- a rack and pinion focusing system. It is made up of two tubes sliding one into the other. The inner
one is moved by a rack and pinion couple 
- an image erecting system (see figures 5-9) 
- the main tube in aluminum #1. Buy it with a length equal to the objective focal length. Its inside
diameter must be greater than the diameter of the objective mounting bracket 
- adapter ring in black plastic or aluminum 
- coupling ring in black plastic or aluminum 
- light shade tube.

You can buy objective, eyepiece, erecting and focusing systems from suppliers who advertise in
astronomy magazines, or you can ask an amateur astronomy club for advice. In any case, make sure
to choose diameters for your components such that they will fit each other; otherwise, you will need
to fabricate fitting rings. You will have to make the principal mechanical parts with a lathe. If you do
not have one, you can go to a machine shop. Since the parts are all quite simple, you shouldn't need
to spend a lot. In any case, ask for a cost estimate. Students of high schools, technical colleges and
universities can often get access to their school laboratories. If you want to get your own machine
tools, you can find commercial Chinese-made lathes that are available for less than a thousand
dollars. For the same price, you can buy also a small used lathe.

RESOLVING POWER AND MAGNIFICATION POWER

The magnification of the telescope (M) is given by the ratio between the objective and eyepiece focal
lengths: M = Fob/Fep. You cannot simply magnify at will, seeing more and more details. The maximum
magnification you can reach with a telescope is limited by the diameter of the objective. The larger the
diameter of the objective, the closer are the points it is able to distinguish as separated.

The resolving power (RP) of a corrected objective, expressed in seconds of arc, is given by RP" =
120/D where D is the diameter of the objective in millimeters. The human eye has an RP of about
60". Hence, the maximum magnification you can obtain from an objective (MM) is given by the ratio
between the RP of the eye and that of the objective: MM = RPeye / RPob.
For instance, an achromatic objective with a diameter of 80 mm has an RP of 120 / 80 = 1.5". Hence,
the right magnification using this objective should be 60 / 1.5 = 40X. In practice, you can double this
value, but it is better avoiding to go further, because the amount of visible detail will not increase. In
the end, follow this simple rule: the magnification power of a telescope has not to exceed the diameter
of its objective, expressed in mm. Check the real RP of your instrument by means of double stars
whose angular distances are tabulated in astronomical books.

OBSERVATIONS AT THE TELESCOPE

The most spectacular heavenly body to observe with a telescope is without a doubt the Moon. The
best time to observe the Moon with your telescope is at the first quarter, when it appears only half
illuminated. Under these conditions, lunar mountains and craters project long shadows, making them
better visible from the Earth.

Make your first observations with the simple telescope, the one with the eyeglass lens as objective. At
the beginning, keep the objective at the maximum aperture. At the edge of the objects, you can see
the blue color at one side, and the orange color at the other side. These colors are produced by
chromatic aberration. The image will appear quite confusing. Now place the diaphragm on the
objective. It will greatly reduce the aberrations, you see the difference! But on the other hand, the
brightness of the image will be dramatically decreased as will the resolving power. Using an
achromatic telescope, instead, these defects are by comparison nearly imperceptible even without a
diaphragm. In fact, with this type of instrument, the diaphragm is not needed.

Other objects to observe are the nearest planets. Jupiter shows four satellites aligned along the
equatorial plane, appearing as a model of the solar system. For observing the Rings of Saturn, you will
need of an instrument of good quality and high magnification power. The comparison between the
apparent sizes of Jupiter and Saturn give you an idea of great distances in astronomy. You can also
see Venus, which shows phases as the Moon, and you can even see star clusters and double stars.

WARNING:
DO NOT USE THE TELESCOPE TO OBSERVE THE SUN! 
You will burn the retina of your eye!

What you can do, instead, is to project the image of the Sun on a screen or on a wall of your room.
You can do this during a solar eclipse. You will enjoy an amazing spectacle, which you can share with
many friends.

Terrestrial observations are also amusing. With the telescope, you can appreciate that the birds flying
in your garden are not all sparrows, but also titmice, robins, finches, blackcaps, etc. With your
telescope, you will be able to recognize the various species by their colored plumage. You can also
observe the insects flying on the flowers, without getting your nose stung!

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