How to Make a Telescope

FOREWORD to the American Edition. In this book Jean Texereau tells the entirely uninstructed amateur how to make a first-class astronomical telescope from start to finish-from the important concave mirror to the tube and telescope mounting read}' for use on the heavens. It is an especially well organized book which sticks entirely to the sequence of logic. That is, the entire discussion pertaining to each stage of the work is completed before the book proceeds to the next stage, hence you will not get lost on the way. Because some of that discussion contains a little physical optics it may tend to scare the novice away. Yet you don't have to master all these parts before you begin. Instead, set to work on the mirror and then nibble at them between spells of grinding. Because you will then be actually immersed in the interesting work, the important appertaining theoretical side will then seem more to the point.When you have completed your telescope and become familiar with the general literature on telescope making you will be better able to place Jean Texereau's book on the scale of things. It is not a book for the skitterer who is content with a lick and a dab and a promise, but leans in the direction of the steady, painstaking worker who will become what is known in the hobby as an advanced amateur-one who can turn out an essentally perfect mirror.Month by month, as a series of articles on telescope making, now translated in this book, appeared in 1'Astronomie, the monthly magazine of the Astronomical Society of France, it became evident that Jean 7'exereau's approach to the art was noteworthy. When his acquaintance was scraped by mail it proved that as early as 1938 he had begun as an amateur with Ellison's The Amateur's Telescope and the Amateur Telescope Making books. Like many American advanced amateurs he had turned professional without turning his back on the amateurs, and was therefore what Pat Driscoll of Rochester has patly termed as an