This little 3D printed telescope kickstarted my journey into astronomy. The design is free and open source, and uses 3D printed parts, aluminum tubes, and hardware store nuts and bolts.
Azimuth is controlled by physically sliding the plastic across the ground. Sure, I could put it on a turntable, but that would make it heavier.
Aiming
My Hadley has two upgrades that help it aim.
Finderscope The first upgrade is an 6x50 finderscope that says “orion” on it. I found it in my local astronomy club’s shelf of spare parts, bought it for $10, and designed a 3D printed adapter for it to fit onto my Hadley. It features integrated crosshairs and helps me aim at planets at a glance!
Sliced Pifinder The second upgrade is the Sliced PiFinder.
Fixing the Astigmatism
When I tried to focus my Hadley on mars, I couldn’t see very much. It looked like a blob.
When I looked at Saturn, I noticed a sort of double-saturn effect. The Hadley’s default telescope mount was very wobbly. I assumed that the pattern I was seeing of two saturn images was actually one Saturn image vibrating back and forth quickly.
Based on this assumption, I designed a much stiffer truss mount.
