Bartol’s beefy ‘BlueShift’
MANY AMATEUR TELESCOPE makers have built their own equatorial mounts. Indeed, in the days before the Dobsonian revolution, German equatorial mounts were the most common type for amateur telescopes. They tended to be made from pipes and other plumbing parts.
When amateur Thomas Bartol made his first telescope, a 25-cm f/5.6 Newtonian in 1986, he built a machined-aluminium equatorial mount for it and used it to successfully view Halley’s Comet.
