These are the unique features of GI-Scope, my 10"F5.6 Newtonian. I called my scope "GI" because when I went to buy the material for the shroud, the only ripstop nylon that could find the wasn't some variant of dayglow orange was this dark green camo stuff.
The fact that I made my tube out off 12" PVC drain pipe ment that the scope was going to be heavy no mater what I did unless.... I decided to cut out any mass I judged to be surplus to requirements, as it turned out I cut awa too much and so had to stiffen the tube somehow, this I did with the aluminium channel seen above. The way I decided to make my cut outs was in the form of a truss system such that the remaining material formed the truss members. This left me with a problem, how to mount the tube on an Equatorial Mount, I solved this by building a cell for my truss tube.
What was left do after my BVC mirror arrived from ASM Products Reg the Canadian inventors of BVC a black vitrified ceramic material with similar properties to pyrex just with a lower price tag! Was to install the supplied mirror cell into the tube, I decided to make some modifications to keep weight down so again I with alittle better judgement this time cut away what was not needed. I also installed a coolng fan, I installed mine to suck air away from the mirror as I feel this will reduce fan induced tube currents.
Well here is the finished article, if an ATM can ever call his scope finished, I'm currently building a 4.25" Cassagrain guide scope for this scope so I can take longer exposures for my astrophotos I'm also building the Mel Bartels computer control system for this scope to make it into a GOTO scope, I will be adding a seperate section on this as the project progresses.
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