Jerry Oltion claims to have come up with a new design for a telescope mount
It looks odd. But how cool and nifty it is. And too - he's released the design into public domain.
I didn't want to be influenced by what others had done, so I purposefully didn't look for other designs until I had come up with one on my own. I followed a few false leads, but I eventually figured out that a spherical base resting in a socket would let me point the scope anywhere in the sky with equal ease, and it would let me rotate the eyepiece to a comfortable position no matter where I was looking.
That was half the battle, but one of the things I didn't like about Dobsonian mounts is that you have to keep shoving them by hand to track the stars. How could I make my mount track automatically? The answer to that came in a flash of inspiration: The stars move because the Earth--a sphere--rotates. But I was building a spherical telescope, so if I made it rotate in the opposite direction, it would track. Once I realized that, the solution was obvious: rest the sphere against an axle that points at the celestial pole, and rotate the axle.
Confident that I had just reinvented the wheel--almost literally--I went online to see how other people had done it. Surprise! Nobody had.
It looks odd. But how cool and nifty it is. And too - he's released the design into public domain.
