6-inch f/8 Dobsonian

Built by Asif Khan of India

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! Even though the mirror is not aluminized yet, it gives great views! The photographs below don't justify the view I see. You can experience the real joy only when you look through the telescope.

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