Clock drive and Elbow Telescope

[Dawson]

I am still sorting through some pamphlets and paperwork from Alan Heath’s house. I found this fascinating photo from about 1961 of a clock drive he had built and an 8×50 Elbow Telescope… I have to confess I’d not heard of an Elbow Telescope before.

I just thought this may be something other may be interested to see, and to save the image for prosperity.

James Dawson
Nottingham

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[Bill Barton]

Elbow telescopes were salvaged from World War II artillary guns. Back in the day amateur astronomers would use anything they could lay their hads on to observe the skies.

[Dawson]

Thanks Bill.

I found a picture this morning of Alan using his Scotch Mount.

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[Nick James]

That is an impressive Scotch mount.

I think that the Scotch mount (aka barn-door mount) was first described by G.Y. Haig in JBAA Vol 85, No 5. I’d only just joined the BAA in 1975 and this was the first paper that I found really interesting. I built a basic copy and used it for many years to take night-sky photos using a manually driven screw and a stop watch (things were hard back then). In the 1980s I built an advanced one which had a crystal controlled stepper motor drive and took this to Tenerife to photograph C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake).

[Jeremy Shears]

I too built a Scotch mount in the 1970s, Nick. I was surprised how well it worked for time exposure photography. Mine was always “fully manual” with its hand-turned screw.

This was more successful than another project from the JBAA: to build a small planetarium (I think the inspiration was a paper by Harry Ford). I used Meccano for the equatorial support which held an electric motor to which was attached a ballcock. The ballcock contained a lightbulb and there were holes to project the constellations. It never really worked and heaven help anyone who tried to recognise the constellations.

A slightly more successful project was to build a lunar photometer, using a photocell, from a design by Chris Watkis. Chris lived not too far away from me, in Sevenoaks, and was a great help. I can’t remember if this was in JBAA, the Lunar Section Circular, or elswhere.

[Denis Buczynski]

Seem to remember that the lunar photometer using a photocell was used extensively by a Lunar section member Lawrence Fitton to measure albedo changes in local lunar topography. I think there was an interesting “discussion” in the LCC about the validity of the method with a member (David Jewitt) who became very famous as the first astronomer to recover Comet Halley at its 1986 apparition. Old days old memories!
Denis Buczynski

[Mr Giovanni Di Giovanni]

Your notes are beautiful. They remind me of my enthusiasm and excitement when I built my first telescope half a century ago. A Newtonian D200 f1400, worked on in my garage, the mount entirely homemade using mechanisms from old cars being scrapped and gears from a rotisserie, with manual tracking. The photometer was a photodiode at the focus of a microscope used to examine photographic plates. Reading your notes, memories emerge unchallenged and presumptuous.
Happy New Year 2026 (and following) to all of you.

[Bill Barton]

It looks like Alan used Dexion to construct his mounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexion

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