First, some history about how the Amateur Telescope Making books came to be. In the early 1920s a naturally curious fellow, Albert Ingalls, happened to read an article in an obscure magazine by an even more curious fellow, Russell Porter. The article was about the "Poor Man's" telescope and told the story of how a group of Vermont villagers built their own reflecting telescopes. It was to be a fateful event because Albert Ingalls was an editor of Scientific American magazine and telescope making was about to gain a much larger audience through America's preeminent science magazine. Ingalls and Porter would, during the next 30 years, create and inspire from others a body of literature that would eventually span a three-volume set of books.

Александр Джеймсон (Alexander Jamieson) - английский астроном.

В 1822 издал "Звездный атлас" (Celestial Atlas, или полностью A Celestial Atlas Comprising A Systematic Display of the Heavens) - фактически, популярный путеводитель по небу для любителей астрономии. С профессиональной точки зрения атлас не ахти каков: выполненный в столетней давности традиции Флемстида, это шаг назад в сравнении с атласами предшественников. Но для карты в нем подобраны внятно, и атлас заслужил внимание любителей астрономии.

In this atlas, Doppelmayr collected most of the astronomical and cosmographical plates which he had prepared over the years for the Homann publishing firm and which had appeared in several of their atlases. These earlier atlases allow us to infer approximate dates for the design and preparation of many of Doppelmayr’s cosmographical plates.

This book began as a set of lecture notes for an undergraduate course entitled ”Observatory Methods” that I teach each year at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The book is intended as an introduction for the college astrophysics major to photometry in the optical region of the spectrum of astronomical objects using CCD imaging from groundbased telescopes. Of course, in these times of Giga-buck satellite telescopes of various sorts, groundbased optical astronomy is only a part of observational astronomy. Within groundbased optical astronomy, spectroscopy, only briefly mentioned here, probably takes up as much or more telescope time as photometry. That said, it is still obvious that imaging photometry is an important part of observational astronomy. With the ready availability of inexpensive CCDs and computer power, even a small telescope can provide an important ”hand on” learning experience not readily available with large, oversubscribed research telescope, or remote satellite observatories.

This is a scanned version of the 1920 edition of Ellison's The Amateur's Telescope. It contains corrections and amendments in Ellison's own hand presumably in preparation for the 1932 edition.

THE following work is designed as a text-book for universities and technical schools, and as a manual for the field astronomer. The author has not sought after originality, but has attempted to present in a systematic form the most approved methods in actual use at the present time.

Each subject is developed as fully as the necessities of the case are likely to require; but as the work is designed to be a practical one, those methods and developments which have merely a theoretical or historic interest have been excluded.

THE design of the following treatise is to furnish a text-book for the instruction of college classes in the first principles of Astronomy. My aim has accordingly been to limit the book to such dimensions that it might be read entire without omissions, and to make such a selection of-topics as should embrace every thing most important to the student. I have aimed to express every truth in concise and simple language ; and when it was necessary to introduce mathematical discussions, I have limited myself to the elementary principles of the science. The entire book is divided into short articles, and each article is preceded by a caption, which is designed to suggest the subject of the article. Whenever it could be done to advantage, I have introduced simple mathematical problems, designed to test the student's familiarity with the preceding principles. At the close of the book will be found a collection of miscellaneous problems, many of them extremely simple, which are to be used according to the discretion of the teacher.

Let me begin with a confession and some explanations. Before beginning this project, I knew nothing about planetary radar astronomy. I quickly realized that I was not alone. I discovered, too, that most people confuse radar astronomy and radio astronomy. The usual distinction made between the two is that radar astronomy is an "active" and radio astronomy a "passive" form of investigation. The differentiation goes much deeper, however; they represent two disparate forms of scientific research.

THE object of this little book is to give in simple language a comprehensive idea of the Universe. It is intended to supply a felt want, and does not aspire to be an exhaustive text-book of the science of astronomy ; neither does it aspire to deal with the mathematical and instrumental sides of the science. The use of technical phrases has been as far as possible avoided, so that the beginner may have no difficulty in thoroughly mastering the book and in proceeding to the more advanced works on the subject.