Back to Hobbies
I like doing public science outreach in the form of Sidewalk Astronomy.
Bringing telescopes to where people are and offering them an opportunity to see their world in larger context.
It started when I accidentally took a telescope building class from some
old geezer
who successfully infected me with a love of building scopes people could actually use
(although our underlying philosophical motivations may differ).
My mentor is responsible for the most public friendly scopes generally available today
and indeed my first scope was of his design, but it was not long before I thought; could we do better?
Which brings us to he next best part of Astronomy: Amateur Telescope Making (ATM)
Building individual scopes is great fun, and creating new types of telescopes
that anyone could build and everyone can use is profoundly rewarding for me.
An innovation I am quite keen on is;
combining the flexibility of an infinite axis ball joint
with the ease of construction of a Dobsonian mount
allowing amateurs to build larger and more user friendly telescopes.
The name which has taken hold for this type of telescope mount is
"Sudiball"
which is a made-up mash-up of 'suitable' and 'pseudo-ball' as they are not really balls
but they do work as though they are.
They are the intersection of intersecting planes and a sphere resulting in a sort of skeletal sphere.
Although they could be fashioned in a very wide variety of configurations,
there one (octahedral) form that so lends itself to ease of construction
that it sets its self apart as a standard form for Sudiballs.
Here is a Rogues Gallery of SudiBalls
received so far