LMAO - First Light

LMAO - The LEGO Miniature Astronomical Observatory

One of my most recent projects has been the construction of a miniature remote observatory for the roof of my parents house in Melbourne. After spending hours trying to design how this this would work, I decided that I didn't need to design the thing from scratch. Rather I could use one of the best prototyping media out there - LEGO! Due our family's vast reservoir of LEGO, this made life a lot easier.

The Telescope

As far as size goes, this will probably be one of the smallest remote observatories around. The mirror diameter is 76mm and it has a field of view of around 1 square degree. It was originally a low-cost show piece mass produced by Celestron for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Retail value - €50. While the telescope itself has reasonably good image quality - being diffraction limited at 2 arcsec, for the sake of slewing speed, I could only build in a tracking accuracy of 3 arcsec. Hence the finally images will be a little blurry at the pixel level.

The LMAO 3 inch telescope in its LEGO Hooker mount.

The telescope itself is a replica of the original mirror telescope designed by Isaac Newton and the mount system is a variation of the Hooker mount as used by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s.

Once the telescope is up and running, I'll start work on documenting how all the components were put together so that others may also construct their own LMAOs and we can start a network of miniature astronomical telescopes accessible to the public and placed around the world.

First Light

Obviously there is still a lot to do before the LMAO is finshed and free available for public use. However, as proof that this little observatory will actually be able to see something, I have include the first light image below. This is a 10 second exposure at ISO 400 of a random star field which I used to check the focus. As you can see, quite a few more stars are visible than with the naked eye. The goal is to be able to image the many nebulae that the southern hemisphere has to offer.

Iimage of a random star field, used for checking the focus of LMAO - 10 seconds at ISO 400