Designing and Building a 3D printed Robotic Telescope

May 2025

This page serves as a place to document the development of our robotic telescope as it has come into existence over the last few months. The scope of this project has undergone multiple changes due to multiple challenges we experienced. Originally, we planned to use 203mm primary mirrors that had been purchased prior by a project sponsor. These mirrors were sold as 'spherical,' so foolishly we assumed this meant a good quality spherical mirror. Using these mirrors was always going to be a compromise in a system meant to take pictures and video due to spherical abberation.

Out of an interest to make the hardware that was already available work, we went ahead with designing a system to test out image quality at different points within the focal line. We however were unaware is that in the context of commonly sold telescope mirrors, 'spherical' with no additional information simply meant roughly shaped, plated mirrors that ended up being entirely useless for resolving an image on a our camera sensor. After becoming aware of this, we decided to shift courses and invest in a higher quality parabolic mirror. This new mirror had an additional benefit of having a shorter focal length, which allowed us to shrink the overall machine.

Additional Updates to this page will be made in the near future. We are still working on changes to the second revision gimble and camera system and expect it to be finished in the next two to three weeks.