Dobsonian telescope [SEP] named after
Dobsonian telescope
A Dobsonian telescope is an altazimuth-mounted Newtonian telescope design popularized by John Dobson in 1965 and credited with vastly increasing the size of telescopes available to amateur astronomers. Dobson's telescopes featured a simplified mechanical design that was easy to manufacture from readily available components to create a large, portable, low-cost telescope. The design is optimized for observing faint, deep-sky objects such as nebulae and galaxies. This type of observation requires a large objective diameter (i.e. light-gathering power) of relatively short
the optical diameters unheard of before their appearance.
The design is named after Dobson because he is credited for being the first person to have combined all these construction techniques in a single telescope design. He was reluctant to take credit, however, pointing out that he built it that way because it was all he needed. In his own words, he jokes that he was "too retarded" to build a more sophisticated telescope with an equatorial telescope mount. With its simplicity of construction and use, the Dobsonian has become