The Cooke telescope is waaaay simpler than the ultra complex Zeiss Coude, it should not take long to refurb so this thread will not be very long.
The main thing is carefully stripping the paint. Although the original OTA finish is black paint, we plan to leave the tube brass. My graphic designer wife Debra says the complimentary color to the brass look is green, so a dark green it is for the pier and mount.
I'm going to leave the as much of the other components as original as possible. The drive will need cleaning up, it's quite complex with all them gears. I love the spinning brass balls.
I have to admit, I'd love to house the Cooke in an appropriate observatory, but we can only have some many domes around here. The pier is very heavy, so I'm going to have a custom dolly made for it so I can roll the mount out the door.
I'm looking forward to showing the telescope off to guests. I plan to acquire a period correct smoking jacket, glass of sherry, monocle on a chain, a learned astronomy book from the era and an English accent so I can properly wax on about the wonderfulness of the 120 year old Cooke telescope!
Can you imagine? A guy born in Italy, raised in Canada pretending to be English... Edwin Hubble would be proud... :-)
Edited by Peter Ceravolo, 03 April 2020 - 04:33 PM.