With Simple, Homemade Telescopes, You Can Explore the Stars

One of my greatest joys in amateur astronomy has been in building my own equipment. The great Clyde Tombaugh originally inspired me to do this — a Kansas farmer's son, Tombaugh's plans for attending college were frustrated when a hailstorm ruined his family's crops. With no money for college, Tombaugh was devastated. His family was in survival mode, putting the young man's astronomy and mathematics intentions indefinitely on hold.

Tombaugh was not one to quit, however, so in 1926, he built several telescopes with lenses and mirrors he ground himself — on a fence post! From broken farm equipment, he built his own equatorial mount so his telescope could move with the rotation of the Earth. Tombaugh had no camera, but he was able to make highly detailed drawings at the eyepiece. The amateur astronomer recorded images of Jupiter and Mars in this way, and sent them to the Lowell Observatory, so impressing the astronomers there that they offered him a job. Tombaugh worked at the observatory from 1929 to 1945.

While there, he became involved in the search for Planet X — what we know today as the minor planet, Pluto.

To make the discovery, Tombaugh used a blink comparator to compare his photographic plates of the same star field taken at different times. With a blink comparator, if an object in the field moves back and forth it is something other than a star — an asteroid or comet, perhaps, or in this case, a newly discovered planet.

Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/24740-simple-homemade-telescopes.html