Odds and Ends

Abstract

Homemade binoscopes or binocular telescopes (as we know them today) have been around since the late 1920s, when Mr. Hilmer Hanson of Holdrege, Nebraska (one of the earliest pioneers of binocular telescopes), had his original homemade Newtonian binocular telescope introduced in Amateur Telescope Making Vol. 1 in 1931. Most if not all of the big binocular telescopes that we see today that are being built by some pretty clever amateur telescope makers can, in fact, trace their initial binocular tele-scope design or sometimes called Binocular Telescope’s DNA all the way back to Mr. Hanson’s original homemade binocular telescope that he made back in the 1920s. Mr. Hanson even ground and polished his own 6-in. mirrors, and considering the amount of materials he had available to him at the time, it was no small feat. When compared to his humble 6-in. f/8 binocular telescope (see Fig. 7.1), one can see little difference in the design of binocular telescopes that the amateurs are making today, at least when it comes to the smaller Newtonian-sized Newtonian binocular telescopes.