Homemade Telescope to Bring Stars to Public
An Oakland man fascinated with the stars is putting the finishing touches on a homemade 30-inch tubeless telescope he says will be one of the largest in the country regularly available to the public.
Kevin Medlock, 32, says his five-year labor of love will conclude in May when he expects to install the one-ton instrument as the centerpiece in an observatory on 2,900-foot Fremont Peak, 75 miles south of here in Fremont State Park.
Medlock told of spending about 2,500 hours alone in his garage, painstakingly grinding and polishing the 30-inch mirror, acquired years ago as a 450-pound hunk of Pyrex.
Available to Public
“My telescope is too small for professional work, but it will be one of the largest in the United States that is regularly available to the public,” the amateur astronomer said in an interview. “A fuzzy blob of light to the naked eye will become a pinwheel of light, just like you see in the textbooks.”
The hobbyist, who is a member of the Fremont Peak Observatory Assn., builds and services research equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He traces his interest in telescopes to a school science project when he was 7. Since then, he has built a dozen telescopes, but none approaching the new device.
There is scant doubt that Medlock is heavily immersed in bringing the dome of the sky down to where it can be examined. He and his wife, Debra, were married in 1977 in an astronomical observatory.
Open Framework Used
Medlock’s brainchild uses an open framework instead of the traditional tube between the front and rear elements. This, he said, cuts the weight by half. But he got trouble with the benefit. The structure no longer fit his garage.
Undaunted, he moved his now 12-foot-long instrument to a forklift repair shop owned by another amateur astronomer in nearby Milpitas. The telescope is now undergoing fine tuning for the haul to Fremont Peak.
Once the telescope is in place, Medlock said, he plans to try to hook the machinery into a computer to locate celestial objects by coordinates, then track the bodies automatically.
Medlock said he envisions private use of his telescope around public programs, allowing the layman to see how major telescopes hunt the heavens for dots of light millions of light-years away.
