Astromedia Build a Working Newton Reflecting Telescope Kit for Age 14+

For the price this is an amazing educational project. You only need scissors/ sharp knife, glue and for holding parts in place paper clips, rubber bands and clothes pegs. Choosing the right solvent based glue is important. You will need 2 tubes. as there is a lot of gluing. The instructions are mainly text so you do need to check the pictures on the box and the website. I found it straight forward to make and it worked first time. To check the final alightment I sighrd on a neighbour’s TV ariel and that worked fine. Leave making the second more complex eyesight until you have done the res. You don’t need it to get the telescope working and take your time letting things set because it is very easy to smear the lens

Brilliant purchase

This construct-yourself telescope is very well thought out (the few errors in the main instructions are given corrections in a separate sheet). The quality is also very good, considering it is all cardboard apart from the mirror and lenses. You need to take it slow, and I don't think it's finishable in a day. If you want to follow every instruction (including the finer, optional bits), you need to give sufficient time for allowing glue to dry fully (we're talking about getting precision, here, which requires particular patience and care). But the end result is quite amazing. You can test your assembly before you've completed it, and, if you've done all the (slightly tricky) alignment well, you should be pretty pleased with the quality of what you see; and, in the process of the assembly, you will have learned how a telescope really works, and possibly appreciate the genius of its first inventors and refiners. I can't really rate this too highly. (I didn't use scissors to remove each element, but just pushed them out gently from their sheets, which I think is safer.)