| I built
this telescope for the Victoria Chapter of the RASC in the fall of
2004. It is used and stored at Dominion Astrophysical Observatory
for our Saturday night public events and is also taken to our star
parties. The optics are very good and yield excellent views of the
planets as well as breath taking images of deep sky objects. This
telescope is a larger version of my 10 and 12 inch folding truss
units. A heavy duty equatorial tracking platform is shown under the
telescope. It is of similar design as my other one with similar electronics.
RASC member Jack
Newton purchased the 20" Coulter Optics mirror blank at the
RTMC swap meet in the 1980's. The mirror was ground and figured by
Leo Van der Byl with Jack helping. Jack used the original telescope
for some years and during that time, produced the images for his
book Guide to Amateur Astronomy .
The mirror and
secondary were removed from Jack's telescope and another was
built by George Ball and Gene Steves using these optics. This telescope was very large and not
that portable plus the secondary cage was only 17" in diameter,
masking off the full 20" diameter of the mirror. Ronchi testing
shows a very good figure on the mirror so using it at full aperture
is desired. Also, the focuser was for 1 1/4" eyepieces and
2" could not be used.
Again the optics were
removed and I used them in the telescope shown here.
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