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| John Dobson, 1915 - 2015, is credited with a design of telescope that allows amateur astronomers maximum light gathering at an affordable price. He also advocated home building of his designs to save money. Of course, telescope manufacturers quickly discovered that what can be built cheaply at home can also be built still more cheaply in a factory. Hense, Dobsonian telescope/mount combinations are available at astonishing prices. See video below. |
A Dobsonian telescope is an alt-azimuth mounted Newtonian telescope design popularized by John Dobson starting in the 1960s credited with vastly increasing the size of telescopes available to amateur astronomers . Dobson's telescopes featured a simplified mechanical design that was easy to manufacture from readily available components to create a large, portable, low-cost telescope. The design is optimized for visually observing faint deep sky objects such as nebulae. This type of observation requires a large objective diameter (i.e. light-gathering power) of relatively short focal length and portability for travel to relatively less light polluted locations.
Dobsonians are intended to be what is commonly called a "light bucket" operating at low magnification, and therefore the design omits features found in other amateur telescopes such as equatorial tracking. Dobsonians are popular in the amateur telescope making community, where the design was pioneered and continues to evolve. A number of commercial telescope makers also sell telescopes based on this design. The term "Dobsonian" is currently used for a whole range of large-aperture Newtonian reflectors that use some of the basic Dobsonian design characteristics, regardless of the materials from which they are constructed. --Wikipedia