Telescope making, Optics and Astronomy

Introduction

You reached the astronomy and telescope making pages of Berthold Hamburger. I hope you will enjoy reading about my projects as much as I'm enjoying pursuing them.

Amateur telescope making encompasses many different disciplines. Physics, mechanics, engineering, metalworking, woodworking, to just name a few areas involved. This in particular makes it such a wonderful hobby, as there just seems to be no limit to what can be learned.

There's nothing like looking at the stars through a telescope that you have crafted with your own hands in particular if you also polished and figured the optics in the process.

Over the many years that I have been an active telescope maker I received a lot of help, technical assistance and encouragement from fellow ATMs. Therefore I hope to be able to return some of that knowledge to the community by sharing my projects and ideas. Since one of my main interests lies in polishing and testing mirrors, you will find a lot of information about those topics, but other areas like mechanical design and electronics are also covered as well have some information about metal-lathe work.
Like so many other telescope makers I tend to spend more time building then observing which is why the astronomy section is comparatively small. However, I have tried my hand on astrophotography and you can find a few examples on those pages.

I invite you to regularly visit my Blog page, where I upload current test results and information about ongoing projects.