ATM bino newts - Frank Sczcepanski's design

[Mel Bartels <mbartels@efn.org>]

Frank showed his 8" binocular newtonians at Table Mountain Star Party.
His bino newt is wonderful!

The optical design is two primaries and two diagonals, with one primary
staggered outside of, and ahead of the other.  Its diagonal must be a
bit larger because the diagonal to eyepiece distance is more.  The
outside mirror is also raised a bit in height so that when the scope is
pointing up at a 45 degree angle, your eyes are horizontal.  This was
first described in ATM I, I believe, so not a new design.

What is new is Frank's implementation.  He has a sliding focusing
arrangment that slides both eyepieces and diagonals, using rods and
teflon 'V's for bearings, and the inter-ocular adjustment is another
slide that moves just one diagonal/focuser.  Key to Frank's design is
the bringing out to the approximate focusers' location, two collimation
screws for the outside primary.  He designates the inner primary as the
master, and the outer primary as the slave.  By tweaking the two
collimation screws that tilt the slave primary up/down, and left/right,
the observer can instantly perfectly merge the images.

I cannot tell you how wonderful his scope worked.  The focusing, and
particularly the image merging was easy for each observer to do in
seconds.  My experience with most bino scopes has been that they are
either in collimation and merged for the owner and you take your chances
because the owner is hovering nearby saying, "Don't touch anything -
it's taken me hours to get this far!", or, the scope is out of
collimation and the owner says nothing can be done till morning.
Frank's scope can be completely out of alignment, yet be fixed in
seconds for any observer.

I hope to have some scanned pics of his scope and other innovative
scopes from TMSP on the web in a couple of days.

I was surprised how much better the view was through both eyes than any
single eye.  Close an eye and the view dimmed greatly, not just a
little.  Because you can align the collimation so easily, Frank's scope
was good not only on extended objects like M31, but also was good on
small detail stuff.

I have known Frank for years, since he lives in Eugene, Oregon, my
town.  He is an aircraft mechanic, and pilot by trade.  He is one of
these many unsung amateurs that quietly build wonderful scopes.  Frank
will have his binos and large dob at the Oregon Star Party coming up at
next new moon.  I always stop by Frank's camp because I never know what
simple mechanical gadget he's come up with.

--
Clear skies, Mel Bartels    Programmer/Analyst, amateur astronomer
Eugene, Oregon, USA         homepage: http://www.efn.org/~mbartels
mailto:mbartels@efn.org     atm, atm-digest list-owner
Motorize A Dob: http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~mbartels/altaz/altaz.html