I’m not exactly a “shooter” as I don’t participate in clays, skeet or trap. My shooting is in the pursuit of game. I enjoy the type of guns I hunt with and handload and reload for some of them. As for hobbies outside of hunting, I enjoy astronomy, telescope making, fly tying, fishing and have split cane to build a flyrod. I’ve been grinding, polishing and figuring telescope optics starting in my teen age years. I always have an outstanding, unfinished project lingering on my mind and in fact. Below are photographs of three scopes I’ve made. The largest was a 15.5” F/4.8 Newtonian that I built from scraps of plywood and other readily available materials. The mirror was hand ground, polished and figured by me out of a ship’s porthole. It was a good low power scope but suffered from astigmatism due to strain in the glass. The one with the blue tube was also made from scrap and the tube is Sonotube, construction tube for concrete columns, covered with model airplane iron on skin. The mirror was hand ground, polished and figured by me out of a Pyrex 8” blank cast specifically for making telescope mirrors. It is an F/5 8” mirror meaning it has a 40” focal length of Newtonian design. It is a Dobsonian design, alt/azimuth over Teflon scraps riding over a Formica base and PVC rings. With a 32 mm eyepiece It offers a widefield (2 degrees) suitable for deep sky views outside of our solar system. With a shorter eyepiece, it is decent on planets. It can be carried easily in the backseat of my 4Runner and set up in minutes. The long skinny tube in the third photo houses a 4” refractror lens at f/15 (60” focal length) and is an aplanat of Fraunhofer design. I ground, figured and polished the flint and crown blanks of optical quality glass and it is housed in a baffled tube of aluminum irrigation pipe I bought from Hastings Irrigation. It sits on a tripod in use (not depicted). It offers a coma free view across its field of view. Of the three scopes, the 8” is the easiest to use. I disassembled the largest. Another hobby has been ham radio. I’ve built and used more than a handful qrp (low power) transceivers and have communicated around the world using wire antennas and Morse Code (CW). I bounce in and out of that hobby. I've also enjoyed collecting old gunning shorebird decoys, but am in the "had enough" acquisition phase presently. My focus now is on a 1.5 year old French Brittany as I am getting her ready for woodcock and quail. “A hobby is nothing more than an enjoyable means of murdering time” or something like that.
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