Alex Schmid's 8" / 9.75 Newtonian

Sometime 1984 - 1985 Alex Schmid received two mirror blanks from his uncle. One blank he sold and the other was to become the primary mirror of his 8" / 9.75 Newtonian. The design is based on two plans. The first plan was for a 6" / 8 Newtonian in the now classic Richard Berry book on building telescopes. The tripod design came from an Astronomy August 1992 article. The Berry mount design was modified to accommodate the larger optics and as Alex was to find out scaling dimensions for larger projects takes some experimentation as changes were made to make the mount more rigid. In the end as far as a mount is concerned overkill is better !

Construction Chronology of the 8" / 9.75 Newtonian

1985 - Started grinding mirror
1991 - Resumed mirror grinding
Summer of 1993 - Basic construction of mount and tripod
August 1993 - Mirror aluminized
Summer 1994 - Experimented with modifications to mount to allow for latitude adjustments
Spring 1995 - Finalized mount modifications, including making it more rigid

Alex hopes to motorize his mount in the future. Alex can be reached by email at schmid@phastf.phys.uvic.ca .