Sky & Telescope - December 2024 - 75

LAUREN WITH HER SCOPE: JERRY OLTION
perfect satellite dish. Disk-drive reader
arms provide bling for the dish attachment.
A floor vent for a forced-air heating
system makes a perfect solar panel.
And so on.
The mirror cell is particularly ingeLauren
and her Hubble replica stand ready
for a night of observing.
nious. The lid to Lauren's bucket had a
crisscross molded into it nearly an inch
deep for strength, so Lauren cut out the
four pie-shaped wedges between them,
leaving just enough plastic to capture
the mirror without touching it. She
drilled holes and inserted carriage bolts
for bottom support and collimation and
added clips to hold the mirror down. It
worked like a charm!
The altitude bearings looked better
attached to the wide section, but that
wasn't the right balance point, so Lauren
added weight all around the perimeter
of the mirror cell to compensate.
Slots in the lid provided perfect pockets
to add a coil of lead wire to each.
Lauren then covered the lead coils with
flocking material to provide a black view
from the focuser.
When it came time to cut the cardboard
tube for the upper end, Lauren
found herself unwilling to trust her
luck. She could just envision cutting it
an inch too short and having to redesign
everything. So she bolted trusses
(extendable painter's poles) to the side
of the bucket, cut the top off the parts
scope (knowing there was plenty of
bottom left for the final OTA), and used
the adjustable trusses to fine-tune the
upper OTA length. Then she cut and
mounted the solid tube. Lauren says,
" The downside of doing it that way
is that I had to move the focuser and
spider assembly to the longer section of
the Sonotube. It was a little extra work,
but not so bad. "
With the OTA roughed out, now
was the time for bling. The real Hubble
scope is studded with access panels,
handholds for astronauts, and various
other thingumbobs and doohickeys, and
Lauren wanted her replica to sport the
same look. So she gathered up harddrive
parts, wiring conduit, ball-bearing
races, heat sinks, and whatever else she
thought might look good. She laid the
most spacey-looking pieces down on the
upper section, then put reflective foil
duct tape over the whole works.
The lower end required some shimming
to remove the bucket's natural
taper and bulk it up a little to better
match the Hubble's proportions. Lauren
used cardboard layers to even out the
taper, and Styrofoam tiles to add the
needed thickness and texture. Then she
added more bling and foil-taped that
section, too.
Yet more bling went on top of that
and around back to provide a final
techie touch. Lauren says, " The bottom
is a little steampunked out. I figure the
bottom is going to be rarely seen, so I
took artistic liberty with that. "
On the other end, she matched the
Hubble's iconic sun shield almost perfectly.
It's a sheet of rigid pet-door plastic
cut to shape with ordinary kitchen
aluminum foil glued to it, attached to
the top-end cake pan with an ordinary
door hinge. How did she make it stay
open? " I checked an entire bin of hinges
for one that was tight, " she explained.
The solar panels were surprisingly
easy to make. The heating-system floor
grates already had the right look, so it
was a simple matter of painting them
black, adding edge trim, wires, and
sparkly contact paper underneath to
contrast against the black paint. As Lauren
proudly says, " The grates Hubbled
up nicely! "
The focuser sits just above the leftside
solar panel, so Lauren initially
figured that she'd have to remove that
panel when observing, but it turns out
with an eyepiece in the focuser the
panel doesn't get in the way.
pThe primary mirror rests securely in its
bucket-lid cell.
pAluminum foil makes the focuser look like
just another piece of random Hubble hardware.
pThe bottom of a Sam's Cola can covered in
foil made a perfect dish antenna.
sk yand tele scope .o r g * DECEMBER 2024 75
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Sky & Telescope - December 2024

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