18-inch f/4.5 Dobsonian Telescope with an Equatorial Platform

Because of its nice large mirror, this is my best telescope for visual observing. I bought it from a commercial vendor in 1995, but in 2005 I rebuilt it from the ground up, so that only a few parts except for the mirrors remain from the original telescope. My main goals in rebuilding the telescope were to make one that:

• Could be assembled and disassembled without tools
• Had an open back for faster cooling of the mirror
• Had an equatorial tracking platform
• Was equipped with digital setting circles

The finished product has all of these features, plus one more: While I was rebuilding the rest of the scope, I had the main mirror refigured by Swayze Optical. It is now diffraction-limited and yields very sharp images, even at high magnification.