The 8 Inch Cube  2002 

         Have Scope, will Travel

After a long abstinence from telescope making, I conceived this design for a travel telescope in 2002. The goal was to pack an 8-inch telescope and its accessories precisely into a single box that could be carried away using just one handle.

All components nest inside one another like a Matryoshka (Russian nesting doll); the outer shell works as the portable carrying case. It transforms a simple box into a travel telescope designed for ergonomic viewing—offering a comfortable eyepiece position without the need to kneel just above the ground. An 8" f/5.0 Sky-Watcher mirror set was purchased from Rudi Idler at Fernrohrland telescope shop for this project.

At the ATT in Essen, a astronomy fair , I found a nice little rotating focuser with a 1.25" barrel at the booth of the Dutch company Astrotechnik.

The Cube-Dob project travels while the build was still in progress. Work on constructing the telescope began on a garden workbench during the 2002 Whitsun holiday, while visiting my mother-in-law in northern Croatia, near Zagreb. While mother and daughter chatted on the terrace, I was busy making plenty of sawdust with a jigsaw right next to them. The necessary birch plywood and tools fit neatly into the storage compartment beneath the trunk floor of my Mercedes A-Class.

By the time I returned from holidays, the mirror box and the primary mirror cell assembly had already taken shape. Back home, the altitude bearings were cut out.

The rocker box and the lid—serving as a stand, combine to form a custom-fit transport case for the 8-inch travel telescope.

Everything fits inside the tube section between the altitude bearings: the upper cage with the focuser retracted, the baffle, a Rigel QuickFinder, three eyepieces, Karkoschka’s star atlas, a small planisphere, and a red-light flashlight.

The optical tube was placed into the rocker box, rotated 90 degrees; alongside it, in each corner, sat a bundle of the collapsible truss poles, secured with rubber bands.

The stand is then carefully placed over the top like a lid and locked in place with the snap-latches. The box is closed!

As for the color: Yes, it had to be YELLOW again!

A year later, I took the finished Dobsonian telescope along to Croatia for stargazing, where people marveled at it and what could be seen through it.

Canadian amateur astronomer Mike Renner discovered my "cube-style" Dobsonian telescope online via the Backnang stargazers' website and built a near-exact replica. Mike wrote an article about it for *Pulsar* magazine.    See below.