Back in 2010 Gary Leonard Cameron published his PhD dissertation titled “Public Skies: Telescopes and the Popularization of Astronomy in the Twentieth Century” at Iowa State University. While typically most PhD Dissertations wouldn’t be the subject of an astronomy products news website, when we came across the document we were […]
![Celestron Telescope Founder Tom Johnson (left), is pictured with Johnson’s fork mounted 18.75 Dall-Kirkham Cassegrain telescope in 1962. As for the fork mount that defined Celestron’s early Schmidt-Cassegrains, Johnson describes it as based upon that of this telescope that was the subject of the cover story for the March 1963 issue of Sky & Telescope. “My idea of a fork mount was to make it portable like the 18-inch in the article in Sky & Tel. It had to have a folded optical path. That unit [the Cassegrain featured in Sky & Telescope] was a Dall-Kirkham Cassegrain.”](https://solarastronomytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/image005-322x212.gif)