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I am Sathish BS, an astronomy curator and telescope maker. CTO of startup: Aryabhata Mobile Planetarium LLP. It's been 2 years I have been addressing Isha Vidhya students on their career day. Every time they have shown a keen interest in astronomy and enormous curiosity with eagerness to learn more. So have thought of starting an astronomy club in all Isha Vidhya schools. I have plans to run this club throughout the year and one of the main pieces of equipment needed is a telescope to do celestial observation and tinker with their curiosity. For this to happen I'll be training two teachers ( science and maths ) from each school to design a telescope(10 telescopes to 10 schools, each school gets one) to design their own 60mm telescope which has a 700mm focal length magnification ranging from 28x to 87x.
A 62mm refractor telescope will show you:
- binary stars with an angular separation of over 2", e.g. Albireo, Mizar, etc.
- faint stars (up to 10 stellar magnitudes)
- sunspots (with an aperture filter)
- phases of Venus
- lunar craters
- Jupiter and its four moons
- rings of Saturn
- Uranus and Neptune as stars
- large globular, e.g. M13, and open clusters
- most of the Messier bright objects (not detailed).The highest magnification is 150x ( with an additional Barlow lens ). I want to start this initiative with an affordable budget. In each school instead of buying a costly imported telescope, I want to impart the knowledge of making one. This is the only way to understand the details of a telescope. My mentor told me once " the one who builds a bike will know how to service and maintain ", buying and making are totally different dynamics. So please join hands in making this project happen.
