EDIT: It has now been sold to an ambitious telescope maker in Italy. 

We had a 12-inch Casssegrain optical telescope assembly for sale at an extremely attractive price: just two hundred dollars (or any reasonable offer). You pay for shipping.

The full-thickness primary mirror alone is worth much more than that as a raw piece of unfinished Pyrex! (United Lens charges $450 for an equivalent, 12.5″ diameter, roughly 2″ thick, raw, unfigured, disk of Borofloat!)

The telescope was part of a package (mount-cum-telescope) that was purchased from the Ealing company back in the 1960s by the University of Maryland. The scope itself never gave satisfactory images, so the UMd observatory sold it off in the early 1990s, and it ended up at the Hopewell Observatory about a decade before I became a member. Hopewell kept the mount, which still works quite well, but removed the telescope and replaced it with a 14-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain.

I recently examined the telescope itself (the one we are selling) and found that it indeed has a hyperbolic primary with a focal length of about 4 feet (so it’s f/4). Presumably, the convex secondary is also a matching hyperboloid, to create a Ritchey-Chretien design, but I don’t feel like perforating a large spherical mirror to create a Hindle sphere to test it properly. In any case, using a 12-inch flat, I was unable to produce decent Ronchi images.

As you may know, figuring and collimating a Richey-Chretien require a LOT of patience, more than I have. My suggestion would be to refigure the primary into a paraboloid, procure a standard flat, elliptical diagonal, and repurpose this as a Newtonian. Refiguring this mirror a task that I don’t feel like taking on, since our observatory already has a 14″ Newtonian, a 14″ SCT, and I already have built a 12.5″ Newtonian of my own. Plus, I am finding that figuring a 16.5″ thin mirror is plenty of work already.

So, our loss could be your gain! Make an offer!

I attach a bunch of photos of the OTA from several viewpoints, including a ronchigram. The mirror has been cleaned off since these picture were made; the little electronic motor was for remote focusing of the secondary.