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Curiosity

DIY 6" Newtonian Reflector Telescope

Details

External ID
47295279
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Curiosity
Website domain
vercel.app
Launched
March 8, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
81
Upvotes percentile
0.8856088560885609
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

A DIY Newtonian reflector telescope with dobsonian mount. A fun to do hobby project taking us closer to the moon and beyond. A lot of plans ahead on how to make it much better and portable but this was the first time me and my friend implemented or rather built a telescope.Have a look at what all we have captured.

Enrichment

Theme
space and geospatial visualization tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Hardware & robotics
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
diy newtonian reflector telescope kit
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No This is a physical DIY optical telescope project involving physical mirror fabrication, optical alignment, and mechanical Dobson mounts.

What it would actually take: Requires optical engineering, mechanical design, precision physical fabrication (cutting, grinding/polishing glass optics, aluminization), and carpentry or 3D manufacturing to build a rigid Dobsonian mount and optical tube assembly.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Commercial hobby scopes ($100-200 range), Printables telescope designs (Wallace, Gromit, travel truss dobs), Traditional wooden telescope builds

Concerns raised: Cheaper commercial scopes are shoddy quality, Portability/weight makes solo setup difficult, Assembly complexity and time investment, Website/project documentation currently unavailable

Feature requests: Improved portability with better bag straps and carrying system, Reduce assembly complexity (currently requires more than two hands), Add solar filters for sun observation, Guidance on selecting appropriate 3D printers for telescope projects

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 23 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #5 of 24 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 118 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.