Hello every one. Some of you may have seen this picture before. Many of you probably know that my idea of a big telescope is a bit different than most people’s. You know those giant, mega-office building sized scopes resting on top of Mauna Kea on Hawaii Big Island? Well, those are soon to be considered normal big. Students at my Smith’s School of English in Kotoen ( スミス 英会話 甲東園 ） know all about it and we often discuss it in our conversation classes. ( 英会話 ) This one here in the picture beside me is relatively big for a home-made, personal, back-yard telescope. It is a 16″ f4.5 Borosilicate mirror for any optics geeks out there. Now this is not a cutting-edge optic but we want to get the thing working properly before investing too heavily. Still, although not finished and two years on, it works really well and there’s little incentive to press on, and that goes for both time and money.
A 16-incher, that 40.6 cm for you metric addicts, gets you into some pretty deep sky, but you absolutely have to get out into a really dark place to experience it. The best place in Kansai is at Oeyama, a name I’ve mentioned many times before. It’s in the outskirts of Fukuchiyama on the road up to Miyazu on Pref Route 9 off Route 175. Beautiful scenery in which to hang out, great sky, many wild animals and altogether too many insects but I just burn a whole bucket of coils during the night and that makes it pretty well tolerable.
Martin Werner Zander
マーティン・ワーナー・ザンダー
Smith’s Franchise in Kotoen 月謝制 Monthly Tuition Conversation School
Good luck, Martin!