Astronomical Telescope “Hadley” – an easy assembly, high performance Newtonian | Hacker News Reader

Astronomical Telescope “Hadley” – an easy assembly, high performance Newtonian

printables.com

56 pointsyehoshuapw7 comments

I built a Hadley, and it's pretty amazing. I have seen the rings of Saturn with it- and the moon- WOW. Here's a video I did about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA076d-gsyY

Also wrote it up on my website, which has a link to the Hackaday article I wrote on it: https://miscdotgeek.com/3d-printing-the-hadley-114mm-newtoni...

I still need to build a proper base for it. Balancing it on a chair or some other thing is just no good. It needs to move smoothly. What you think you know, don't realize how pronounced it is until you're watching through a decent telescope, is that the cosmos are on the move!

I see you wrote you used PETG - would you recommend it, or would you have done it again in PLA?

(due to accuracy.)

It worked fine, no regrets. It's more stable for outdoor use, so that is why I went with it. I've printed exclusively with PETG.

The author mentions that locating metric fasteners in bulk may be a problem.

When I need anything metric (automobiles use a lot of metric fasteners of various sizes) I order them from BelMetric.com [0].

You can order one or one hundred or one thousand and they assemble your order and get it out to you faster than any other provider of fasteners that I have used.

They have an excellent selection including specialty parts that might be useful for building telescopes.

https://belmetric.com/

They're the best.

Overall this looks like an interesting project that is not difficult to make. I may need to level my printer bed and see what happens.

Does anyone know of a cool (cheap) way to get adaptive optics in one of these devices?

Adaptive optics and cheap don’t usually go together and I don’t know of any successful amateur attempts. In any case, Hadley’s appeal is that it’s cheap and 3d printed, it’s not a precision instrument that is limited by the atmosphere.

That said, assuming you’re doing planetary photography, you can do speckle imaging by using an astronomy camera to take lots of short-exposure frames and running them through software such as AutoStakkert!4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckle_imaging

The mirror used in hadley telescope is spherical instead of parabolic because it is small enough that the difference don't count much for the desired image quality. An adaptive optic would make no sense in this scenario.

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