The first Skyward 400 is a prototype we built with our friend Matteo, nicknamed Plastico Gigantico. Its 16 inch mirror was hand ground and polished by Matteo and coated by Alan Ward, and its big yellow and red parts were printed in ABS on HevOrange, our home built large format printer.

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Want the whole story?

Read about how Plastico Gigantico came together on our blog.

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Want to follow along?

Development happens in the telescope-design-logs channel on our Discord page.

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Can you build one?

Not yet, but that's the plan. Once the design is ready the files will be free on GitHub, and we'd like to have several around for star parties too.

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The open source Skyward 400 will be released on GitHub, designed to be built with inexpensive, off the shelf materials. We will be grinding, polishing and coating its mirrors ourselves, and we are also looking at thin slumped mirrors.