Advice on building a telescope

cheers, appreciate it

Shane

Is the best way to learn about collumation by buying one off the shelf? I wouldnt have thought so.

Not so.

An off the shelf unit was colliminated ONCE before.
At least you know that it CAN BE DONE with that scope.

A first time scope that you have just built yourself may be un-collimatible.

what does the wave front accuracy of a mirror mean?

It is a means of describing the accuracy with which the mirror (or other optic) brings the light to a focus. Errors (roughness or a misshapen surface) on the surface of the mirror are doubled in the wave-front. Basically you need to figure your mirror's surface so that the largest deviation from the perfect paraboloid is less that 1/4 of a wavelength of light (at 550nm) This is just a few millionths of an inch! Sounds impossible to achieve, I know, but isn't!!

You will find Jean Texereau's book How to Make a Telescope explains all these concepts far better than I can! Check out the www.willbell.com website for the book. You could also trawl around some of the articles on mirror testing at stellafane.org/misc/links.html#Figuring

Phil.

Thanks. This may seem like a stupid thing to say and to may run foul of a few in here but bare with me Im new at this. But I had the idea just as a little experiment before I go buying mirrors and things to try and make a slap up scope with the magnifying side of shaving mirror and other bits and pieces to see what kind of results I get. Would this work or am I off my head.

am I off my head

Using a shaving mirror....YES.