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   Are you ready for this? Then welcome Ed Jones and his invention, the Jones-Herschelian telescope known as the Chief. This masterpiece design was featured in the November 2008 issue of Sky & Telescope and is the most recent and best of the unobstructed telescope designs. The design uses 2 ordinary lenses to convert a Newtonian into an unobstructed telescope! From S&T: "Meet the Chief"... Could this new optical design be the wave of the future for ATMs? It's not everyday that a new optical design emerges from a telescope maker's workshop, but thanks to Ohio ATM Ed Jones, that's what's happened. Meet the Jones-Herschelian, a catadioptric Herschelian schiefspiegler that Ed dubs the Chiefspiegler, or Chief for short. "This is the scope of the future!" says Ed. That's a bold statement, but the closer you look at the Chief, the more you're likely to agree.  For many amateurs, off-axis reflectors represent a telescopic ideal, combining the unobstructed light path of a refractor with the perfect color correction of a reflector. There have long been offaxis designs (including the well-known schiefspiegler and Herschelian variants), some of which are practical to build and use, some less so. All avoid the central obstruction found in other reflectors by tilting the primary mirror so that the focal point can be intercepted without blocking the incoming light, Such telescopes are known generically as tilted-component telescopes, or TCTs. While TCTs solve one problem, they create another. Tilting the primary mirror introduces an alarming amount of astigmatism into the image. There are two ways to minimize this optical aberration. Wanna' know more? Then you're going to have to join Ed when he gives his talk and demonstration on Raleigh testing! See you there.... |
