USES
An ideal Key Asset for inclusion in a museum, science or astronomy based theme. Highly detailed museum quality model based on extensive research and documentation, including measurements and photographs of the original telescope, located at the Tartu Observatory, in Estonia.
History
The “Dorpat Refracting Telescope” is considered one of the most important scientific instruments in the history of science. It was designed and created by the great optician Joseph von Fraunhofer, the “Father of Astrophysics”, in 1826.
It was the largest telescope in the world at that time, and demonstrated the first-use of his inventions of the “German Equatorial Mount” and the “Clock Drive”, used on almost all telescopes until just recently.
The original is on display at the Tartu Observatory, in Estonia, formerly the USSR. It has recently undergone a complete and painstaking restoration.
The Model
A major research project in my field of Industrial Archeology, I modeled the Dorpat telescope in SolidWorks™ from original research in five major libraries, including the Naval Observatory Library, Cal-Tech Library and others. I also communicated with the Director of the Tartu observatory in Tartu who provided me with many photographs and verified the dimensions from my field notes.
A table, chair and stepladder are included to assist in establishing scale, as the telescope is quite large. All appropriate surfaces/features are UV mapped.
The zip file contains .obj’s of the telescope, table and chair (both used at Tartu), as well as individual .obj’s of the Base Subassembly, Tube Subassembly and Polar Axis Subassembly to facilitate animation.
The telescope is 437,206 polys, while the full assembly depicted in the previews contain 457,608 polys.
The .obj files were converted from SolidWorks™ using SimLab Composer. The preview thumbnails were created with KeyShot2 from Luxion.
Please see also my other projects by clicking on the Gould Studios link at the top of the page.
