How to make a telescope at home?

buy lenses or mirrors from sources like Edmunds Scientific and mount them into tubes of varied length until you find a focus point. Telescopes have two or more lenses or a mirror and lenses. The front lens or back mirror is the "objective" and it bends and focuses light rays to a point in a long tube. The curve of that lens determines the length (or focal length) of the tube. The back lens resolves or focuses the image. Two magnifying glasses of different sizes can make a simplistic telescope. Get a large one (2" or larger) and a small one (1" or smaller). Put the little one behind the big one and pull them apart slowly, while looking through the little one, until you see an upside down, sharply focused, magnified image of something off in the distance. Measure that and it is your rough focal length. You can then mount them into several tubes of different sizes diameters that fit into each other, taping the big lens to the outer large tube and the little lense to the inner smalle tube. You can then expand and contract the various tubes until your reach the focal length, which will change with the distance of hte object from you.

Amateur telescope making used to be popular years ago, before cheap(er) factory made telescopes became widely available. That was before the Internet, so most of the material is in books and not on the web. I suggest looking in your local library. Below are a couple on amazon.com.

better buy 1

buy a telescope in kit form? see... telescopes-in-kit-form.com or www.ebay.com

You would need complicated glass grinding machinery. Just buy one from WalMart.

First of all, ignore the suggestions of Wal-mart and ebay, and instead check with your local astronomy club. Many such clubs offer workshops on telescope making or can point you to where there would be one. In addition, there are many books on how to make your own telescope. Be aware that if you plan to grind and polish your own mirror that it could take some time to complete (especially if you've never done so before) and patience is definitely a virtue. If you have a little mechanical skill, you could buy the optics pre-made and build a simple but effective Dobsonian (look it up) telescope. In decades past, making your own was the only way to obtain a telescope if you weren't wealthy. Nowadays the price of decent telescopes has plummeted compared to the old days. Saving your money and buying a commercial scope thru outlets like Orion is now doable for the average person. Usually folks who make their own telescopes today do so as an extra pastime and they will already have a usable scope in their possession for nightime viewing in the meantime.

Get onto your computer, get your credit card, go onto ebay, win the bid, get it delivered! you never need to leave your house!