If you have designed a home-built piece of amateur telescope equipment you may add it to our site quit simply:

Qualification

You can have your project on the Web. It is really quite simple. All you need is the have some drawings in a form people can read, write up a few construction notes, and take a couple pictures.

Your project does not have to have been written up in Sky & Telescope to qualify. If you have build it and it works and you have a picture or two and you have drawings and can add a text description then it qualifies. If your project has to do with amateur astronomy, let us know about it.

If you have such a project, please drop us an email to tell us all about it.

Drawings

The best approach for the drawings is to provide them in a format that we can read and let us convert them to the various formats requested by our site visitors. We use AutoSketch 6.0 running under Windows '95 which can read the following file formats:

• *.SKF -- AutoSketch 6.0
• *.DWG -- AutoCad
• *.DXF -- Drawing Interchange
• *.WMF -- Windows Metafile

Unfortunately, not all CAD software produces exactly the same type of files. Please send a small attached test file if there is any doubt.

If you have drawing as a number of graphic files (.GIF 87a or *.JPG), we can include these in the text notes as illustrations but they tend to be too fuzzy to be completely satisfactory for actual construction.

Text Description

The plans must have a text description with them. You can provide this description in an ASCII Text (.TXT) or in a WordPerfect (.WPD) file. We will convert the file to .HTML and add the appropriate headers.

It is most helpful if your description includes a materials list with cost estimates. Also if you ordered special materials, please include the ordering information, preferably with a Web Site URL.

You can use our mirror grinding stand for an example and we have a little lesson on designing for the Web.

Pictures

The pictures may be in electronic format (.GIF 87a or .JPG) or in the form of snap shots on paper. If on paper you will have to send us copies by conventional mail so that we can digitize them. We can return the prints if you desire.

It is best if the pictures have a human being in them. This gives them both scale and humanity.

What You Get

Your work will be credit to you. This is not optional and will include a name, general location (state, province, or country), and an email address.

You also get your choice of any of our low-stress computer furniture plans or an anthology of science fiction stories. Just fill out this simple form.

If you like this idea, please drop us an email to tell us we're on the right track. This Web site will disappear if we do not hear some interest in it.

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