We built a cardboard telescope ourselves. We were quite impressed at how sturdy it is once it was pieced together. The cardboard shapes and cutouts were well designed and form a very solid structure.
It took a while for a nice clear night to come along, but once it did we got the telescope out and set it up in our conservatory. Being a clear night in Winter, it was very cold, so we faced it out the door and tried to keep as warm as possible.
OK, so this isn’t an actual photograph from our telescope, the viewport on ours doesn’t allow for easy photographs to be taken.
We tried angling the camera from a smartphone into the viewport, but we couldn’t get a focused photograph unfortunately. Perhaps a macro lens would be best suited to this job.
The photo above does give you an idea of what we could see though. Looking very carefully through the telescope, we could just make out some of the larger craters on the moon’s surface!
The moon was in the phase, and so we had a decent area of lit surface to look at.
This is what our cardboard telescope looks like once assembled.
We had some issues using the telescope, but they weren’t too difficult to overcome.
- It can be tricky to use the notches to raise the telescope when the moon is higher up in the sky.
- The notches raise the telescope quite a lot, so getting the height perfect can be difficult. For finer height adjustments you might need to stack some books underneath it.
- The focus level is adjusted by pulling the main body forward or backward. It is a little bit sensitive and can move if you bump the telescope, causing you to lose focus. Just be careful not to bump it while viewing.
We’re happy with the telescope though. For a cardboard construction it is quite sturdy. We’ve had fun viewing the moon so far. Next we might try some other celestial objects, however we’re sceptical at how much we’ll be able to see with 16x magnification.