For Amateur Astronomers, It’s Up Telescope

The paint has yet to be applied and the computer-guided motors and gears have yet to be installed and the eyepiece isn’t in the right place. You’ll have to climb a rolling staircase to take a look.

Having said all that, the Los Angeles Astronomical Society is still bursting with pride.

The society’s members will hold the public unveiling tonight of one of the world’s largest amateur telescopes--certainly the largest ever built in one summer.

Since June, members have been pushing themselves at a merciless pace to ready their 14-foot-high structure in time for this evening’s $50-a-person fund-raiser at Griffith Park Observatory. The event, sponsored by Friends of the Observatory and featuring 40 other amateur telescopes, will run from 7 to 10:30 p.m.

The astronomy group’s 31-inch reflecting telescope, which resembles a miniature oil derrick, has roughly five times the power of the Griffith Observatory’s 12-inch lens.

Club members have invested $4,500 of their money in the project and will spend $10,000 by the time it’s through. It will be permanently housed at the group’s ranch in Frazier Park in southern Kern County.

For years, club members have spent each Wednesday at the city observatory in Monterey Park, swapping stories about great lenses they’ve ground and waxing rhapsodic about great men of astronomy such as Newton and Foucault. But that easygoing atmosphere began to change after two members of the society drove a van to Las Cruces, N. M., in March to meet a famous astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.

Tombaugh was in contact with an institution that no longer needed two large mirrors and, although wishing to avoid publicity, was willing to donate them to deserving parties.

The local astronomers snatched both up--a $100,000 value--and decided to make immediate use of one of them, a 31-inch mirror in top condition.

The work that followed inside the Monterey Park observatory workshop was not only hard but tedious. The group’s leader, Tom Dorff, a tree trimmer by trade, also turned out to be a good welder and hard driver of men.

First came the geometric trick of applying a standard telescope design to the size and focal length of the mirror. A club member then began to grind the secondary mirrors to reflect the image back to an eyepiece near the bottom.

In the middle of that exacting operation, Dorff dropped the secondary mirror, which shattered. That meant that, at least temporarily, users of the telescope cannot look through it from ground level but instead have to climb up to an eyepiece at the top of the telescope.

Finding a more suitable task, Dorff worked with a couple of other members cutting and welding steel 2-by-4s of the base structure, known as the mirror housing, and the upper structure, which holds the replacement secondary mirror and eyepiece.

The moment of truth for the 19-member association came on a weekday evening two weeks ago outside the Monterey Park observatory.

First they lifted the mirror on a plywood sheet and slid it into its housing at the base of the telescope. Then, with much vocal fanfare, they rolled the base structure out the door of the observatory on iron casters, down a ramp of wooden planks onto the grass. The upper structure came next.

Several minutes passed while they fussed with the high-pitched excitement of a Greek chorus over how to raise the 10-foot-tall upper structure to the top of the base, about four feet off the ground.

“Is there a way?” someone asked at last in despair.

“It’s only 360 pounds and we’ve got 19 people here,” Dorff shot back, sounding irritated.

Finally, straining against the leverage, half a dozen men lifted the upper structure overhead and into place.

A lead ball and other weights were clamped hurriedly onto the back of the base for counterbalance so that the upper structure could be raised to the heavens by finger pressure.

There was another problem. How were they going to get up to the top to look through the thing?

“We’ll put a ladder up and swing it over,” someone answered.

“Well, I ain’t going to stand up there,” announced Charlie Chinzi, the group’s master lens grinder.

While the others searched for a suitable ladder, the telescope was lowered to a horizontal position. Chinzi found an eyepiece and put it in place.

“I want to have first light” (the first look), he said, pulling the upper structure to his chest.

“Hey, this thing’s going to be operational tonight,” Dorff said.

“Newton smiles down,” someone echoed.

Chinzi said he could make out the grains of glass on a distant street lamp.

“All hail. Charlie says it’s beautiful,” someone said.

Then they swiveled the rig around toward Jupiter, which was just playing hide-and-seek behind the branch of a eucalyptus tree.

Discouragement Sets In

“If I had my tools, I’d cut it down,” Dorff said.

By then, some members were losing heart. A few even marched off after declaring huffily that it was time to quit.

“Go, if you want to,” Dorff would say.

About 11:30, a member named Mike Dostalik was on the ladder, rocking the upper structure up and down, side to side.

“I see a planet and a half!” he yelled.

One by one, everyone climbed the ladder to take a look.