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.
It sits on the Hill Mount, a portable and cheap altitude mount I designed that costs around $20. It’s lightweight enough I have walked two miles to a subway stop while carrying it the whole time.
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.
It has a number of upgrades - including an integrated finderscope and a high-tech computerized aiming system I printed and hand-soldered myself.
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 and designed a 3D printed adapter for it to fit onto the telescope. It features integrated crosshairs and helps me line up planets at a glance!
Sliced Pifinder
The second upgrade is the Sliced PiFinder. It’s a targeting computer that permanently lives on my telescope - which is an incredible sentence. We truly live in the future.
The PiFinder is a device that uses a raspberry pi and a camera to take pictures of the sky and compute where in the sky your telescope is aiming, even with high light pollution. Since it knows where the telescope points, you can select a particular galaxy or nebula and it will tell you how to push the telescope to get there.
PiFinders are an open-source project that can also be bought for $500 from the designer. Mine was built for $110 - a mere slice of the cost. The stock PiFinder is designed for a Raspberry Pi 4 using the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera ($50) with a $50 lens, but I 3D printed and assembled the parts myself, used a scavenged battery pack and previous-generation Raspberry Pi 3 from a defunct project, and a $30 IMX462 camera and $12 lens.
Taking photos on a budget
I like to think of myself as on the cutting edge of cell phone astrophotography. I use a 3D printed clamp to hold my phone up to the eyepiece and take photos using my phone camera. However, tapping the phone button causes vibrations that wobble the telsecope. To fix that, I use a raspberry pi pico microcontroller as a wireless remote shutter. I programmed it to act as a bluetooth mouse and connect to my phone. When I press the built-in button, it moves the mouse to the center of the screen and clicks the “take picture” button. To see pictures this setup has taken, take a look at my Astrophotos page!
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I put everything together for version 1 of my telescope truss mount. It stands! It was also an inch too wide for the telescope to properly rest on it. I had to rotate it the wrong way so it could fit on the stand for the picture. Aargh.
Some of the clamps did grip the rods well, some of the clamps didn’t. The base did feel pretty solid, but the top part is still pretty wobbly after full assembly.
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Came out with some blobs and very stringy, which isn’t good, but they came off with some pliers. Time to go cut my dowels to size and see if it all fits
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My 3D printed telescope has a problem: it’s very wobbly. That means it’s hard to point the telescope at a planet and have it stay pointed at the planet. It also means I can’t focus it well, or take good pictures through my phone.
The telescope itself is fine, but the mount is the problem. There’s a 3D printed mount included in the files with the telescope, and I built that 3D printed mount (after trial and error and discovering pipe sizes are a lie ).
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I woke up early and saw Jupiter and Saturn!
Thoughts on the observing: I have two eyepieces, a high power 6mm and a low power 25mm. I couldn’t get a picture of the planets with my high power lens because my mount is too wobbly and I couldn’t find the planets once I mounted my phone on the telescope. I did see Jupiter through it amidst the wobbling, and it looked like a featureless white blob.
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I woke up early to go see Jupiter and Saturn and turns out it’s still really really hard to align this telescope! I took videos in the hopes I’d catch at least one good frame, now to review them and see if that’s true. I got a decent video of Saturn in my low power lens, hope it shows up well as rings instead of fuzzy blob
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With all those upgrades, I was able to mount my phone to my telescope. Recently, the moon finally reached the right phase for it to be visible, so I got great shots of the moon!
With my 6mm high power lens, the moon was super duper detailed. And I realized something amazing: the moon was moving. I was so zoomed in I could see the rotation of the earth! That’s incredible!
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(Part 3 of my adventures with my 3D printed telescope! Previous part)
I tried adding 3 upgrades, but only two of them worked. Check out an amazing moon photo below!
Upgrades My mount is very wobbly. To reduce the wobble I had two ideas: first, place wooden dowels along the diagonals of the sides to make the mount more rigid, and second, print an openocular.com phone holder so I didn’t have to touch the telescope to take pictures with my phone and wobble it.
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