Hello!
I just fished a homemade 10" dobsonian out of a pile of trash at the side of the road. It appears from the paper taped onto it to have been made in the 80s. The mirrors seem to be perfectly fine, so I'm super excited to have found this. I have been back and forth in my interest in doing astronomy for years now - first got into it during the epsilon Aurigae campaign way back when. I've never had a telescope, though I did do some binocular visual observations back then.
This telescope has no eyepieces, and no finder scope. I'm usually pretty handy and technical, but I'm a bit overwhelmed by the amount and difference of these things to add on. And having never owned one of these before, I'm not sure what I should be looking at for this particular kind of scope, or else what I should be looking at to make sure everything is okay on this one. Does anyone know of any resources I can look at that would help with these things? Or else just have some quick advice? Point me in the right direction, I really REALLY want to make this thing work.
Cheers!
Chase - GJCA
P.S. - It turns out to be a 12" aperture when I actually measured it, I was led astray by a paper taped on the side of the tube XD
UPDATE: After some research, I've got a basic Svbony finder and a 10mm Plossl eyepiece on the way, just to see if it is working properly. In the meantime, I've been able to clean the mirrors with a glasses cleaning cloth and to measure the focal length, right at 56 in (~1400 mm). The mirrors look to be in really good shape, was able to get a really sharp image of the flashlight on my phone when doing the focal length measurement.
The mount isn't the best in the world. There isn't currently a way to lock in place the altitude adjustment, so it basically will always look straight up. I'll have to engineer some kind of solution for this.
Anyways, exciting stuff =]
Cheers!