How to make a telescope at home. How to make a spyglass: step by step instructions

This article is dedicated to people who are passionate about astronomy. Many quite unfairly consider the telescope to be an overly complicated instrument. There is nothing complicated in its operation, believe me! You will learn how to assemble a telescope in just a few hours. The magnification range from a home-made device is 30-100 times. So, how to make a telescope with your own hands at home?

You will need:

Whatman paper.
Paint (it can be replaced with ink).
Glue.
Two optical lenses

How to assemble a telescope at home - how to make a lens:

Roll up a sheet of whatman paper with a 65 cm tube. In this case, the diameter of the pipe is slightly larger than the diameter of the magnifying glass.

Important! If you use glass from glasses for the manufacture of an astronomical apparatus, the diameter of the rolled sheet will be no more than 60 mm.

paint over inner part sheet in black.
Secure the paper with glue.
Using notched cardboard, secure the magnifying glass to the inside of the paper tube.

We make an eyepiece

The eyepiece of an astronomical instrument can perfectly serve as glass from binoculars. To assemble a telescope with your own hands:

Make sure that the lens is firmly seated inside the tube.
Now, using notched cardboard, connect the smaller tube to the larger diameter tube.

Important! The device for observing celestial bodies, in principle, is ready. However, it has one drawback: the image of objects is turned upside down.

To correct this, add another 4cm lens to the eyepiece tube. Iridescent coloring, or diffraction, can be removed by setting a diaphragm at the focal point. The image loses a little in brightness, but the “rainbow” will disappear.

Naturally, the question arises of how to assemble a telescope with 100x magnification. This is a more serious device, in which the moon is literally visible at a glance. Mars and Venus can be viewed with this device, which will appear as small peas.

100x magnification can be achieved by using lenses with 0.5 diopters more than at 30x magnification. The length of the pipe in this case is 2.0 m.

Important! To prevent a two-meter pipe from bending under the weight of magnifying glasses, special wooden supports are used.

footage

As you can see, there is nothing complicated in the design of the device that every self-respecting astronomer has. Therefore, you will definitely cope with the task and be able to assemble such a system yourself.

The times when anyone could make a discovery in science are almost completely in the past. Everything that an amateur can discover in chemistry, physics, biology has long been known, rewritten and calculated. Astronomy is an exception to this rule. After all, this is the science of space, an indescribably huge space in which it is impossible to study everything, and even not far from the Earth there are still undiscovered objects. However, in order to do astronomy, it is necessary - expensive optical instrument. Do-it-yourself homemade telescope - a simple or difficult task?

Maybe binoculars would help?

It is too early for a novice astronomer who is just starting to look at the starry sky to make a telescope with his own hands. The scheme for it may seem too complicated. At first, you can get by with ordinary binoculars.

This is not such a frivolous device as it might seem, and there are astronomers who continue to use it even after becoming famous: for example, the Japanese astronomer Hyakutake, the discoverer of the comet named after him, became famous precisely for his addiction to powerful binoculars.

For the first steps of a novice astronomer - in order to understand "it's mine, or not mine" - any powerful marine binoculars will do. The bigger, the better. With binoculars, you can observe the Moon (in fairly impressive detail), see the disks of nearby planets such as Venus, Mars or Jupiter, consider comets and double stars.

No, it's still a telescope!

If you are serious about astronomy and still want to make a telescope with your own hands, the scheme you choose can belong to one of two main categories: refractors (they use only lenses) and reflectors (they use lenses and mirrors).

For beginners, refractors are recommended: these are less powerful, but easier to manufacture telescopes. Then, when you gain experience in the manufacture of refractors, you can try to assemble a reflector - a powerful telescope with your own hands.

What is a powerful telescope?

What a stupid question, you might ask. Of course - an increase! And you will be wrong. The point is that not all celestial bodies in principle it is possible to increase. For example, you cannot magnify stars in any way: they are located at a distance of many parsecs, and from such a distance they turn into practically points. No approximation is enough to see the disk of a distant star. Only objects in the solar system can be zoomed in.

And the stars, the telescope, first of all, makes brighter. And for this its property is responsible for its first most important characteristic - the diameter of the lens. How many times is the lens wider than the pupil human eye- all the luminaries become so many times brighter. If you want to make a powerful telescope with your own hands, you will have to look, first of all, for a lens that is very large in diameter for the lens.

The simplest scheme of a refractor telescope

In its simplest form, a refractor telescope consists of two convex (magnifying) lenses. The first - large, directed to the sky - is called the lens, and the second - small, into which the astronomer looks, is called the eyepiece. A home-made telescope with your own hands should be done exactly according to this scheme, if this is your first experience.

The telescope lens must have optical power one diopter and as large a diameter as possible. You can find a similar lens, for example, in an eyeglass workshop, where glasses are cut out of them. various shapes. It is better if the lens is biconvex. If there is no biconvex one, you can use a pair of plano-convex half-diopter lenses, located one after the other, with bulges in different sides, at a distance of 3 cm from each other.

As an eyepiece, any strong magnifying lens is best, ideally a magnifying glass in an eyepiece on the handle, which were produced earlier. An eyepiece from any factory-made optical device (binoculars, geodetic device) will also do.

To find out what magnification the telescope will give, measure the focal length of the eyepiece in centimeters. Then divide 100 cm (the focal length of a lens of 1 diopter, that is, the lens) by this figure, and get the desired magnification.

Fix the lenses in any strong tube (cardboard, smeared with glue and painted inside with the blackest paint you can find will do). The eyepiece should be able to slide back and forth within a few centimeters; needed for sharpening.

The telescope should be fixed in a wooden tripod, the so-called Dobson mount. Its drawing can be easily found in any search engine. This is the easiest to manufacture and at the same time reliable telescope mount, almost all homemade telescopes use it.

Do you suddenly want to make a spyglass with your own hands? Nothing strange. Yes, in our time it is not difficult to buy almost any optical device, and not so expensive. But sometimes a thirst for creativity attacks a person: I want to figure out what laws of nature the principle of operation of any device is based on, I want to construct such a device from and to myself and experience the joy of creativity.

Do-it-yourself spyglass

So, you get down to business. First of all, you will learn that the simplest Spyglass consists of two biconvex lenses– lens and eyepiece, and that the magnification of the telescope is obtained by the formula K = F / f (the ratio of the focal lengths of the lens (F) and eyepiece (f)).

Armed with this knowledge, you go digging through boxes of junk, in the attic, in the garage, in the barn, etc. with a clearly defined goal - to find as many different lenses as possible. These can be glasses from glasses (preferably round ones), watch magnifiers, lenses from old cameras, etc. Having collected a supply of lenses, you start measuring. You need to choose a lens with a focal length F larger and an eyepiece with a focal length f smaller.

Measuring focal length is very simple. The lens is directed to some light source (a light bulb in the room, a street lamp, the sun in the sky or just a lit window), a white screen is placed behind the lens (a sheet of paper is possible, but cardboard is better) and moves relative to the lens until it will not produce a sharp image of the observed light source (inverted and reduced).

After that, it remains to measure the distance from the lens to the screen with a ruler. This is the focal length. Alone, you are unlikely to cope with the described measurement procedure - you will miss the third hand. I'll have to call an assistant for help.

Having picked up the lens and eyepiece, you begin to design an optical system for magnifying the image. Take a lens in one hand, an eyepiece in the other, and through both lenses you examine some distant object (but not the sun - you can easily be left without an eye!). By mutual movement of the lens and the eyepiece (trying to keep their axes on the same line) you achieve a clear image.

This will result in an enlarged image, but still upside down. What you are now holding in your hands, trying to maintain the achieved mutual position of the lenses, is the desired optical system. It remains only to fix this system, for example, by placing it inside the pipe. This will be the spyglass.

But do not rush to assemble. Having made a telescope, you will not be satisfied with the image "upside down". This problem is solved simply by using an inverting system obtained by adding one or two lenses identical to the eyepiece.

An inverting system with one coaxial additional lens is obtained by placing it at a distance of approximately 2f from the eyepiece (the distance is determined by the selection).

It is interesting to note that with this version of the inverting system, it is possible to obtain a higher magnification by smoothly moving the additional lens away from the eyepiece. However, strong increase you won’t be able to get it if you don’t have a very high-quality lens (for example, glass from glasses). It interferes with the phenomenon of the so-called "chromatic aberration", when the image is painted in iridescent shades.

This problem is solved in “purchased” optics by composing a lens from several lenses with different refractive indices. But you don’t care about these details: your task is to understand the circuit diagram of the device and build the simplest working model according to this circuit (without spending a dime).

Obtain an inverting system with two coaxial additional lenses by positioning them so that the eyepiece and these two lenses are spaced from each other at equal distances f.

Now you imagine the scheme of a telescope and know the focal lengths of the lenses, so you start assembling an optical device. The simplest thing is to twist the pipes (tubes) from sheets of whatman paper, securing them with rubber bands “for money”, and fix the lenses inside the tubes with plasticine. Pipes from the inside must be painted with matte black paint so that there is no external light.

It turned out to be something primitive, but as a zero option it is very convenient: it is easy to remake, change something. When this zero option exists, it can be improved for as long as you like (at least replace whatman paper with more decent material).

Many people consider the telescope to be a very complex device that cannot be made on their own at home. This is true in relation to modern devices with a very complex design, but making a simple telescope with your own hands is real. In this article, you will learn how to make a telescope in just a couple of hours.

Following the instructions, you can make a telescope with a magnification of 30, 50 or 100 times. All three versions have the same design and differ only in objective lenses and unfolded length.

You will need:

Whatman;
Glue;
Black ink or paint;
Two optical lenses.

If this is your first time assembling such devices, then it is better to try to make a telescope with 50x magnification.

Lens

From a sheet of drawing paper we roll a pipe 60-65 cm long. The diameter needs to be made slightly larger than the diameter of the objective lens. When using the standard spectacle lens, the diameter of the pipe will be about 6 cm. Then unfold the sheet and paint over the inside with black ink. Thus, the inner surface of the telescope will be black, this will exclude the possibility of stray light (not from the object of observation).

After the dimensions are determined, the diameter and one side of the sheet is painted over, you can roll the sheet and fix it with glue. An objective lens of +1 diopter should be fixed at the end of the tube, using two rims of cardboard with teeth (shown in the figure).

1 - objective lens,
2 - eyepiece lens,
3 - lens mount,
4 - fixing the tube for the eyepiece lenses,
5 - additional lens for inverting the image,
6 - diaphragm

Eyepiece

The next step in making a telescope with your own hands is to create an eyepiece.
An eyepiece lens, for example, can be pulled out of a broken binocular. The focal length (f) of the lens should be 3-4 cm. This distance is determined as follows: direct light from a distant source (for example, the sun) onto the lens, move the lens away from the screen onto which you are projecting the beam. The distance between the lens and the screen at which the light beam is focused into a small point and will be the focal length (f).

Roll a sheet of paper into a tube of such a diameter that the eyepiece fits snugly into it. If there is a metal frame on the lens, then no additional fastenings are needed.

The finished tube with an eyepiece is fixed in a large tube using two cardboard circles with holes in the center. The tube with the eyepiece should move freely, but with little effort.

Homemade telescope is ready. Only it has a small minus - an inverted image. When observing celestial objects, this is not at all a disadvantage, but if you observe terrain objects, you will experience certain inconveniences. To flip the image, it is necessary to install another lens with a focus of 3–4 cm into the eyepiece tube.

Telescope with 30x magnification no different from the one described above, except for a lens of + 2 diopters and length (about 70 cm, unfolded).

Telescope with 100x magnification, will be about two meters long and will require a +0.5 diopter lens. Such homemade telescope will allow you to see the "seas", craters, lava-filled plains, mountain ranges near the moon. You can also find Mars and Venus in the sky, their size will be the size of a large pea. And if the vision is sharp, then among a large number stars can be found and Jupiter.

Image of such powerful telescope having a small lens diameter may be spoiled by iridescence. This is caused by the phenomenon of diffraction. This effect can be partially reduced by using a diaphragm (a black plate with a hole 2–3 cm in diameter). The aperture is set at the point where the rays from the lens converge into focus. This place is determined using the screen.

After such refinement, the image will become clearer, but will lose some brightness.

If you are assembling a two-meter telescope from Whatman paper, then you should be aware that it will bend under the weight of the lens, knocking down the settings. To maintain the geometry of the pipe, wooden slats should be attached on both sides.

This is how you can make a telescope with your own hands. Not the most powerful, but good enough to spark interest in astronomy.

Interesting and exciting observations for you.

You will need

- 2 lenses;
- thick paper (whatman paper or other);
- epoxy resin or nitrocellulose glue;
- black matte paint (for example, car enamel);
- wooden block;
- polyethylene;
- scotch;
- scissors, ruler, pencils, brushes.

Instruction

On a wooden cylindrical blank, the diameter of which is equal to the negative lens, wind 1 layer of polyethylene film and secure it with tape. You can take a regular shopping bag. Wrap the paper over the film. pipe, carefully smearing each layer with glue. The length of the pipe must be 126 mm. Its outer diameter is equal to the diameter of the objective lens (positive). Remove pipe off the blank and let dry.

When the glue dries and the pipe hardens, wrap it with one layer of plastic wrap and tape it together. In the same way as in the previous step, wrap pipe paper on glue so that the wall thickness is 3-4 mm. The length of the outer pipe is also 126 mm. Remove the outer part from the inner and let dry.

Remove the polyethylene. Insert inner pipe to the outside. The smaller part should go inside the larger one with some friction. If there is no friction, increase the outside diameter of the smaller pipe with one or more thin layers. Disconnect the pipes. Paint the interior surfaces matte black. Dry the parts.

For the eyepiece, glue 2 identical paper rings. This can be done on the same wooden block. The outer diameter of the rings is equal to the inner diameter of the small pipe. The wall thickness is about 2 mm and the height is about 3 mm. Paint the rings black. They can be made immediately from black paper.

Assemble the eyepiece in the following sequence. inner surface grease a small pipe from one end with glue for two centimeters. Insert first, then - a small lens. Put on the second ring. Avoid getting glue on the lens.

While the eyepiece, make the lens. Make 2 more paper rings. Their outer diameter should be equal to the diameter of the large lens. Take a sheet of thin cardboard. Cut out a circle with a diameter equal to the diameter of the lens. Inside the circle, make a round hole with a diameter of 2.5-3 cm. Glue the circle to the end of one of the rings. These rings are also painted black. Assemble the lens in the same way as you assembled the eyepiece. The only difference is that the first pipe a ring is inserted with a circle glued to it, which should be turned inside the pipe. The hole acts as a diaphragm. Place the lens and the second ring. Let the structure dry.

Insert the eyepiece into the objective. Choose a distant subject. Hover pipe for sharpness, moving and pushing the tubes apart.