As a departure from the academic study of a particular instrument or maker, readers may be interested in my attempts to recreate classic scientific instruments from junk. The significance of 'junk' is because the attempts were begun while I was living on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, a somewhat remote island without any access to hardware stores or the normal sources of metal sheet, tube, nuts and bolts etc. I was on the technical staff of a station forming part of the communications network for the Apollo moon landings/Wishing to see more of the moon than my binoculars would reveal I decided to try and build the sort of classic 'three-inch' telescope beloved of Victorian amateur astronomers. The three-inch was a convention referring to object glass diameter, whereas microsco-pists referred to eighth inch or half inch objectives meaning focal length. Light gathering, a function of object lens diameter was all important for faint astronomical objects Magnification, a function of objective focal length was prime consideration for the microscope.
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