Readers of Alternate Universe will be aware that Emmanuel involuntarily went straight from the 2004 TSP to the Army Club-Med in Cuba for several months of exciting bondage and discipline games with some uninhibited army girls followed by a non-stop flight back to Dunedoo.
One of the attractions of his proposed visit to Pigzharz was that his brother was not only President of the local Astronomical Society but had just completed the biggest amateur scope in the US, in fact, at 61 inches diameter, one inch wider than the famous Lord Rosse 60 inch leviathan of Parsonstown.
The cost of buying and figuring such a large blank was prohibitive, but Ezekiel found an elegant way around this problem.
He had read in Amateur Telescope Making of early 20th century experiments with vats of mercury rotated at just the right speed to produce a perfect parabola and thus making a liquid mirror.
Problem was however that not only was it exceedingly hard to keep the mercury rotating without excessive vibrations, but that the mirror had to remain pointing upward and could not be tilted.
Ezekiel had reasoned, however, that as the outdoor temperatures in Wisconsin only rose above the freezing point of mercury for two months of the year, all he had to do was rotate his vat in a warm room until the right figure had been achieved and then open the window, so that in a few minutes the parabola froze solid.
For two months a year, the mirror could be placed in cold storage so he got in no observing time during what passed for summer.
This way he got an elegant 61 inch f/4 mirror at low cost as he had used a vat curved so that the mercury was only a quarter inch thick, and no temperature problems as the daily temperature range in Wisconsin is only one degree for ten months of the year.
He had built his truss mount around a customised WW2 90mm anti-aircraft gun bought for fifty bucks from Joe's Surplus Store, but had moved the gun-layer's seat to the top end so he could observe while seated, with tracking and elevation controls operated by remote.
The gun had come with an optical gun sight which made a great 60mm finderscope.
A minor problem was his eyepieces as although he had a good range of RKE's, his 30mm gave a magnification of around 220x with a field of less than a quarter degree.
This meant that observing Messier objects was generally a piecemeal affair. However, when he has skinned another thousand gophers he hopes to buy a 31mm Type 5 Nagler.
Emmanuel hopes to visit his brother and use this impressive telescope on Polaris one evening if the US Consulate ever gives him another visa.