by Jay Reynolds Freeman
I wanted to explore the deep sky too far south for central California sites. So I decided to build an airline-transportable telescope of respectable size, and do some voyaging.
The telescope needed to be optimized for deep-sky work -- I wasn't going south to see planets. Lots of aperture and good light baffling were important, but obstruction size and tube currents were less so.
I planned to transport the telescope on scheduled airline flights. I could put a larger telescope in checked baggage, than in carry-on luggage, even with enough padding to protect it from baggage handlers. I was thinking of Hawaii to begin with, so I worked to the widespread US baggage limits, for which the largest luggage piece shall not exceed 62 inches (157 cm) length plus width plus height, nor weigh over 70 pounds (32 Kg). Airlines generally allow a smaller piece of checked luggage, just as heavy but with 55 inch (140 cm) sum of dimensions.
One consideration was, what is "luggage"? Some airlines are reluctant to check stuff packed in cardboard boxes, for example. A web article suggested a problem with things with no handles for carrying, or too oddly shaped to stack well, or too flimsy. Web-surfing led to Atlas Case, at http://www.atlascase.com, who stock several lines of tough air transport shipping containers with padding. I ended up buying one.
Most transportable telescopes are stored in pieces at home, driven to an observing site, and assembled there for use. My operations would be more elaborate: As baggage, my telescope would be in more pieces, and smaller ones, than the average instrument in the garage. The plan was to unpack it in a motel room, assemble it there at least partly, then drive it to the site. Thus the fastenings and assembly procedures to join the packed pieces could be more complicated and more time-consuming than those used, say, for field assembly of a Dobson.
Over the years, I have played with such designs, via pencil sketches and dimension and weight estimates. I know of two approaches to a compact portable telescope, distinguished by whether the transportation case is part of the instrument, or not. I decided on a separate case, because I was not sure I could construct an assembly stout enough to protect the contents, and light enough for part of a telescope. Yet the case-as-component approach seems viable. For an example, though perhaps too light to survive baggage handlers, see Tom Noe's "TelePort" design, at http://www.annexstudios.com/Design/D-pdf/TpManual.pdf. Another design I considered used a short, stubby telescope tube as kind of a solid-wall duffle bag, full of parts, accessories, and components. One might even have two sections of tubing that, er, telescoped together.
My design became final when sketches convinced me I could construct a truss-tube Dobson so that except for truss poles, the parts would pack into a cube about four inches (10 cm) larger than the clear aperture. The 62-inch baggage limit gives a cube a bit over 20 inches (50 cm) on a side, so after allowing for case wall thickness and padding, a 10-inch (25 cm) telescope would be a good fit, and a 12-inch (30 cm) telescope a tough one. I had a full-thickness 10-inch f/5 Pyrex mirror -- bought from Nova for a more conventional project I later abandoned -- so I picked the smaller size. One technical risk remained:
Truss poles are the wrong shape for baggage. Those for a 10-inch f/5 are about 40 inches (100 cm) long, so a case for them that fits baggage size limits will have no room for much else -- and I do travel with more than a telescope: I need charts and eyepieces, and maybe even extra socks. I needed a way to cut the truss poles in half, and reassemble them in a motel room with a stiff, light, vibration-free joint. I didn't want a symmetrical truss, with twice the number of shorter poles, because the extra weight near the tube's midsection would bring the center of gravity skyward and lead to a larger, bulkier rocker, perhaps too large to transport.
I played with designs for wooden clamps, like those Kriege and Berry (1997) describe for attaching truss poles to the box. I came up with several, but they were too heavy for half-way up the poles of a small telescope. Using telescoping tubing as poles seemed asking for trouble from vibration and slop. I thought of using a piece of oversize tubing as a joint, with O-rings between it and the poles, and that might have worked, but I while I was testing it, I came up with a better way, using an old telescope-maker's friend -- beeswax!
I found that a section of hollow, square aluminum extrusion could rigidly join two lengths of truss pole, if I used beeswax to take up slop and damp vibration. I cut a short length of extrusion, inserted a piece of truss-pole stock part way into it, and epoxyed it in place, making a socket into which another piece of truss pole would fit. Beeswax made the slip fit into a stiff joint that was entirely satisfactory for the telescope.
It is not necessary to fill the space between pole and extrusion with beeswax. What I do is dip each "male" end of the cut pole into melted beeswax before I travel, to get a thin, uniform coat of beeswax on the portion that goes into the extrusion. A little will do, and once there is some there, you don't necessarily need to keep adding more every time you assemble the poles. I do this part of assembly and dissembly in a motel room. Beeswax softens enough under a hot water faucet to make the task easy.
I carry a little plastic bottle of spare beeswax, that I can melt entirely by putting it in a glass filled with boiling water from my portable coffee heater. That way I can add more beeswax if necessary.
I didn't think a whole lot of this idea when I thought it up -- I was just glad to have a scheme that would make my project possible. Yet nearly all the amateur astronomers and amateur telescope makers who have seen the finished instrument have thought the "beeswax trick" to be a considerable technical innovation in the construction of Dobson telescopes. So in case they are right, I have been describing it at length, in case others should find it useful.
With that trick in mind, I went ahead with my project. I had built several telescopes before, including Newtonians to 12.5-inch (32 cm) aperture, but none as complicated mechanically as a truss-tube Dobson, so I was looking forward to a challenge.