How to make your own telescope

It is possible to make your own homemade telescope and use it to observe the night sky.

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Published: March 15, 2022 at 2:34 pm

It is possible to make your own homemade telescope with a few basic materials.

And once the DIY project is completed, you'll have your very own telescope with which to observe the stars and planets.

The good thing about building a small refractor telescope is that they're light and portable, making them idea for taking to dark-sky sites.

What’s more, their optics need little or no adjustment so they are ideal scopes if you’re a beginner.

Our telescope design also makes a good science project for kids and young astronomers to complete at school or at home.

Get help with this build by downloading our Make your own telescope guide (PDF)

How does a telescope work?

Telescope stats explained

Building your own telescope from simple components will help you understand how telescopes work.

You’ll get a great sense of achievement when you glimpse Jupiter’s Galilean moons for the first time.

The heart of any refractor is its convex glass objective lens, which is mounted close to the front of the hollow telescope tube.

Rays of light from distant objects like the Moon pass through this and are bent or ‘refracted’ (hence the name) towards a point just inside the far end of the tube.

This point is the objective lens’s ‘principal focus’ and the distance from here to the centre of the lens is called the ‘focal length’.

Selecting the eyepiece

Plossl eyepiece
A Celestron Plössl eyepiece

At the far end of the tube from the objective lens is the eyepiece, arranged so that its principal focus coincides with that of the objective lens.

If you don’t have one, a 1.25-inch Plössl eyepiece will cost you around £25.

The eyepiece refracts rays of light into your eye.

A telescope’s focuser allows small adjustments to be made to the distance between the eyepiece and objective lens to accommodate different sizes of eyepiece and the standard of your eyesight.

A telescope collects light; it’s the eyepiece that magnifies the image that reaches our retinas
A telescope collects light; it’s the eyepiece that magnifies the image that reaches our retinas

The eyepiece usually has a much shorter focal length, which means that the final image is magnified.

To calculate the magnification, divide the objective’s focal length by the eyepiece’s: an objective with a focal length of 400mm and an eyepiece of 10mm magnify 40x.

The aperture of the objective is larger than that of your naked eye, which means it can capture more light.

Selecting your telescope's lens

The telescope’s ability to magnify faint objects changed the face of modern astronomy and, even today, a small 70mm refractor is still a useful tool.

The first telescopes consisted of a single convex objective lens with a concave eyepiece lens at the other end.

Unfortunately, not all wavelengths of light are refracted by the same amounts, so single lenses cause the coloured components of the white-light spectrum to focus at different points.

The image of a bright star, for example, may appear blurred and suffer from a distracting coloured halo around it.

To overcome this, modern telescopes have ‘doublet’ lenses that use two different glass elements to bring most of the colours to focus at the same point.

RVO Horizon 60ED Doublet refractor telescope

These lenses, which can be cemented together or separated by a small gap, are called ‘achromatic’ objectives.

This is the kind of lens we will be building for our refractor.

Very expensive objectives, which often employ three specialist glass elements (triplets), focus all the visual wavelengths at one point and are called ‘apochromatic’, but they’re more expensive.

Unlike mirror making, grinding and polishing an achromatic doublet lens is not something most amateurs would consider.

Thankfully, lenses are relatively easy to come by and can be surprisingly cheap at around £20 for a 60mm lens.

There are a number of surplus companies offering mounted telescope objectives – see Surplus Shed, for example.

Bresser 10x50 Corvette binoculars review
You could salvage a lens from an old pair of binoculars for your telescope

You may even have a pair of broken binoculars with one salvageable objective lens.

The other parts of the scope are made from plastic pipe that can be bought from a builder’s merchant for around £20, or donated by a friendly plumber.

The first stage of the build requires you to measure the focal length of your lens.

The easiest method is to make a simple wooden stand for the lens and another with a sheet of white card fixed vertically to it.

Align these on a flat surface so the view through the lens is projected onto the card.

Then aim the lens at a distant object – the view through a window works well – and move the lens back and forth until a focused, upside down image of the outside world appears.

Measuring the distance between the glass of the lens and the card gives you an approximate value for its focal length, which will help you design the rest of the telescope.

At this stage it’s a good idea to make a temporary stand for your eyepiece and replace the card with it to confirm that the optical arrangement works effectively.

Use the measurement with the plan on the PDF in the link at the top of the article to calculate the required tube lengths and get sawing!

Aim for the heavens

A beginner's guide to telescope mounts. Credit: WellfordT / Getty Images
Credit: WellfordT / Getty Images

You can hold the finished telescope for terrestrial use (slide the focuser in and out to achieve good focus), but for astronomical observations, a tripod is desirable.

You may eventually want to get a small altaz or equatorial telescope mount for your telescope.

With the latter, you’ll be able to guideit precisely by small movementsof the slow motion controls.

Tools & materials

  • Eyepiece: A medium focal length (say 20mm) 1.25-inch Plössl type telescope eyepiece is a good choice.
  • Tripod: With a little ingenuity you can mount your telescope on a standard camera tripod.
  • Focuser: For the sliding focuser you need an offcut of 43mm diameter plastic waste pipe about 160mm long. You also need a small piece of flat timber (plywood, MDF or softwood) for the end of the main tube.
  • Telescope tube: Use tube with a diameter larger than your objective lens. It needs to be at least as long as the objective’s focal length.
  • Dew shield: You also need about 125mm of tube similar to your telescope tube for the dew shield. We used some 110mm plastic drainpipe.
  • Objective lens: A 60-80mm objective lens won’t cost you much to buy from a surplus store. You could use an old projector, camera, photocopier, damaged binoculars or even a broken telescope.
  • Handsaw or hacksaw: To cut the tube
  • Coping saw: For the round wooden end

Make your own telescope: step-by-step

Step 1

Make your own telescope, step 01

  • Identify the principal focus of your lens with wooden stands and some card on which to project an image of a distant object
  • Measure its focal length
  • Use this measurement with the plans in our PDF instructions to work out the tube length

Step 2

Make your own telescope, step 02

  • Carefully cut the main tube with a suitable saw
  • Wrapping a sheet of paper around the tube is a good way to mark a straight line
  • Take care here; perhaps get someone to help hold it
  • Cut a second piece and split it lengthways

Step 3

Make your own telescope, step 03

  • Cut three lengths of 43mm pipe to make the sliding focuser
  • Split the shorter sections and remove a strip from one so it fits inside the larger piece (a couple of matchstick spacers help the eyepiece fit snugly); the other will stretch to fit around the outside

Step 4

Make your own telescope, step 04

  • Draw round the inside of the main tube on a suitable piece of wood
  • Cut out with a coping saw for a tight fit in the tube
  • Mark the central hole by drawing round the assembled focuser, then drill and cut out the hole for the focuser tube

Step 5

Make your own telescope, step 05

  • Paint the inside of the tube and dew shield black with paint
  • Apply some mastic glue around the focuser and between the wooden end and the main tube when assembling
  • Decide what packing is needed for the objective to fit tightly inside the tube

Step 6

Make your own telescope, step 06

  • Cut a ring of plywood or make three packing strips and position these between the objective and the inside of the tube
  • Push into position with a little tape or mastic glue
  • Fit the dew shield and cover gaps with tape

This How To originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

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