Stellafane Dobsonian Photos from Builders Page

6 inch f/8 OTA by Stewart Longly of Napier, New Zealand

Stewart mounted his OTA on an existing split-ring mount. The tube rotates in the felt-lined cradle.

Posted 2010-Jul-04

8-inch f/6 Telescope by Sydney Mabry (and her dad Mark) of Richmond, VA.

They used full circle altitude bearings, and nicely decorated the tube and mount.

Posted 2010-Nov-05

6-inch f/6 Telescope Model by Doug Stewart of Bakersfield, CA.

This is a model done in Google SketchUp (a free 3D drawing program). It is available for use in their warehouse. You can find it here.

Posted 2010-Dec-17

6-inch f/8 Telescope by Richard Jounget of Duluth, MN

"...as you can see its a combination of different ideas. Searching the internet I found the 7"x 60" rigid plastic tube at www.postguard.com , the vertical supports were made from a freehand drawing of a similar type Dob support Orion uses, and used Richard Berry's swivel base plan. The rocker is 1/2" plywood using 4" PVC for pivot rings. I used the Stellafane tube clamp design which works great." The OTA and Tube Cradle are based on the Stellafane design.

"Telescopes are kind of a addictive thing, I am already thinking of making a larger scope. I totally agree with your advice on starting with a 6" or maybe 8" scope for your first project. The amount of knowledge you acquire on that first scope is tremendous, and I would have never have attempted it without the Stellafane step by step instructions."

Posted 2011-Feb-03

8-inch f/5.52 by Cecilia Page of New Preston, CT

Cecilia attended the Stellafane Mirror Class in 2010-2011 and made an excellent mirror. She then followed the Stellafane Dob Plans exactly and crafted a beautiful telescope to house her mirror. Cecilia said this was her first woodworking project, with wonderful results.

The photo shows her scope at the 2011 Stellafane Convention, where it won 1st Place Optical under 12" and 3rd Place Mechanical Design.

Posted 2011-Aug-02

Stellafane Dob by Danny Landis of Montclair, NJ

Danny's very nice scope, with multiple weight reduction cut-outs, is shown on the south observing field in front on the McGregor Observatory at the 2012 Stellafane Convention. Note also that Danny used a square rocker box base.

Posted 2012-Sep-29

Stellafane Style Dob by Carlucho Paris of Fort Meyers, FL

This nice dob has a very nice improvement to our standard plans - note the curved tube clamps that 'hug' the tube. We opted to keep our plans simple and used straight cuts wherever possible, but if you are comfortable cutting curves this is nice improvement. I provides more surface area to grip the tube, will not distort the tube when clamped hard, and it just looks better!

Posted 2012-Dec-02

Stellafane Style Dob by Alexy Bobkov of San Jose, CA

This 8" f/5.52 telescope features a mirror made by Alexy exactly to our plans. He used our Mirror Making Guide and built our tester also.

Posted 2013-Jun-11

Torsten Mellenthin of Germany

8" long focal length telescope with home made mirror and exact copy of the Stellafane Dob plans.

Posted 2013-Aug-07

Felix Gustavsson of Jönköping, Sweden

"Without previous experience I decided to build a 6" telescope using your plans." An it came out very well, indeed!

Posted 2015-Mar-17

Bob Lautenslager of Santa Cruz, CA

"I am a high school science teacher, and I moderate the schools astronomy club. I hope to get the students grinding mirrors and building telescopes. I spent my summer vacation building a 150mm f5 Newtonian telescope on a dob mount. I made some modifications to the Stellafane plans. I spring loaded the altitude bearings, and used Kydex 0.028" plastic as bearing material. I also used Top Flite MonoKote heat shrinking material to cover the sono-tube, and ultra dark self adhesive flocking material for the inside of the optical tube." Posted 2015-Aug-29

David João of Porto, Portugal 8-inch f/6

"Since a little kid I am absolutely amazed by the universe and only during my 25th I decided that I wanted to finally buy some telescope. Meanwhile, I had a kid and somehow the priorities in life rapidly change but now that I’ve settle down (on my 35th) I was finally obsessed by the idea of buying a telescope. I always wanted a Dob but it never crossed my mind building one - even though I consider myself a DIY person to me it would always be something related to high precision, etc.

Fortunately, I’ve came across your website / community and decided to start reading your tutorial of how to build a Dobsonian. THANK YOU. I had no knowledge of how to build one and you just made it so accessible to understand. I life in Portugal, Porto and I’m also Portuguese. As a software engineer NO ONE believed that I would make it. Well, the results are OUTSTANDING first light and incredible stargazing experience." Posted 2017-Aug-04

Alton Rossman of Salem, OR

Alton built an 8-inch f/5.3 scope. "Thanks for the great website. I used a mashup of your plans and I read Kriege's book on large dobs as well. I was especially impressed with your mirror cell design, it is rock solid and collimates and holds very nicely. The adjustable tube cradle is also a nice feature I hadn't seen in Berry's books or any others. I surfaced and polished this mirror to a sphere but had a lab in California (Optic Wave Laboratories) do the final figure and coating. It cost a little more but the mirror is spectacular. Thanks again for having so much complete information on your website. The plans were very accessible and orderly and the breadth of info you offer is very impressive. Posted 2018-Jan-02

Asif Khan of India, 6-inch f/8

The 20 year telescope! My first Newtonian took around 20 years to complete. I purchased the glass blanks somewhere in year 2000. Rough grind and fine grind it and kept it aside. However work on it never stopped. In between made the Foucault tester, designed the focuser, failed an attempt to polish the mirror using Tar-coal and what not! Also purchased the PVC tube for OTA. Kept planning for polishing and ultimately Covid lock-down gave the opportunity to complete it.

My telescope is entirely hand-built. Only component purchased is a 31 mm secondary mirror. The reason to make everything hand-built was to keep the cost down but more than that to help and encourage other ATM’ers to make their own components.

I also decided to write a blog (astrokhan.wordpress.com) to share my experience and knowledge with fellow ATM’ers specially in my country so they can build their own telescopes.

I didn’t think it would come out this simple and beautiful! Posted 2020-Jul-15

Ed O'Donnell of Mystic, CT, 10-inch f/4

I discovered astronomy at about age 10 in a North Philadelphia suburb. At 14, I was grinding mirrors at the Franklin Institute, and by 16 teaching mirror grinding, working in the FI observatory and Fels Planetarium. I went to Villanova and did photoelectric work on close double star systems. I went to U of Ill for graduate school and did some radio astronomy on supernova remnants and some astrophysics on deuterium in the ISM. But I lost interest in theoretical astrophysics (I like quantum mechanics but it didn’t love me back!), so I transferred to Nuclear Engineering and had a great 40 year career in nuclear submarines in the US, UK and Australia. Astronomy went back to what I always loved….just looking through a telescope!

I purchased a 10-inch F/4 mirror from Cave Optical back in 1976 when I got my first paycheck from Electric Boat in Groton CT. But then “life ensued” and I had put the parts away until now. With your excellent instructions and a friends woodshop, I completed the mount. I’m attaching a pic of the finished product. As opposed to most primary mirrors now, the Cave mirror is old school and weighs a ton! Thus the “interesting balance Point”.

Posted 2023-Mar-26