Zombie Lapdance

So I brought a lot of the junk from the inside of projection TV home with me a while back. The other day I finally got around to turning some of that into a telescope.

The body is a used cardboard tube from an industrial-sized roll of plastic wrap. The big lens at the end is from the projection part of the projection TV. That’s what’s technically called the light-gathering lens. The "magnification" lens at the eye-end of the telescope is from a plastic 35mm camera that I’m never going to use again because it’s the digital age.

It works fairly well. It’s three or four times magnification I’m guessing. I can put my digital camera up to the end and actually photograph what your eye sees through the telescope. This is the front door of my neighbors across the street.

And here’s their mailbox. The image is how you would see it through the telescope, upside-down and backward.

This is the same view with my tragically unmagnified eyeballs.

The moon isn’t going to be in the sky any time I want to be awake for the next couple of weeks, but here’s the view of jupiter, the next brightest object in the night sky these days. (this is digitally zoomed)

As you can see, the color aberrations on this telescope are totally heinous.

I would have to build a much more complex and precision calibrated machine to reduce the aberrations. Basically it would mean extra lenses to correct the prismatic effect of the light-gathering lens bending the light.

I’m fairly certain that I saw a couple of the Galilean moons of Jupiter with my naked eye, but they didn’t show up on the pictures, not even under contrast manipulation of the image.

It’s a little disappointing. I was hoping to use those images to prove to some people that the earth isn’t the center of the solar system. Or at least that they themselves aren’t.