Two Videos from Other Kinds of Workshops -- Dobson Makes a Telescope, Peter Builds an Airplane

Above you can watch a video showing the legendary John Dobson making a big telescope. Born in Beijing, Dobson is the former Hindu monk who left the monastery to show people how to make big telescopes out of shipping tubes and port-hole glass.  Think of it as the BITX of amateur astronomy.  Dobson is the founder of the "sidewalk astronomy" movement -- that's when you set up your 'scope on an urban sidewalk and show the wonders of the universe (or at least the solar system) to passers-by.  We did this in London with Saturn.  (Some of the cynical Londoners couldn't believe it was real -- they thought I had a transparency in the scope tube.) Dobson developed a very simple and popular method of mounting telescope tubes -- the "Dobsonian" method.   

More on Dobson here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dobson_(amateur_astronomer)

Below you can see a short update on Peter's homebrew airplane.