Telescope

This is the 8" referactor telescope I took all of my astro-photographs with. It has a focal length of 2 meters, is equatorially mounted, and has a motor that rotates the telescope to compensate for the earth's rotation.

There's a nice story attached to this telescope. The lens was hand ground more than 100 years ago. In the sixties or seventies (I don't remember), there was a newspaper strike in France. This telescope was in a for-sale add in one of those newspapers, but because of the strikes it only came out outside of the country. Colleagues from the university of Nijmegen drove to France that day to pick up the telescope, without any competition from French buyers who didn't know it was for sale, and so could buy the telescope before it was picked up by the French.