Back in August 1971 I went down the road to Springfield Vermont for the annual convention of the Springfield Amateur Telescope Makers. This organization was started back in the 1920's by Russell W. Porter who almost single-handedly created the hobby. Porter had diverse interests and skills and did much of the mechanical design for some of larger telescopes like the 200" Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar. Stellafane has been going on for a very long time. It's a chance for telescope makers to show off their instruments, share tips and techniques, and do some observing.

There's a permanent clubhouse for the ATMs as well as a couple of permanent telescopes on site. Here are some images from that trip.

The club is on Breezy Hill and the attendees have their telescopes set up all around the area.

A permanent feature of the site is the Porter Turret Telescope. This is a unique design that allows the eyepiece to be stationary and the viewer to be in a warm and enclosed space. The eyepiece doesn't move even as the telescope is pointed to different areas of the sky. Here are some shots of it:

At the time I was building a new mount for my 6" f/8 Newtonian and I got a lot of pictures of innovative designs. (I eventually went with something pretty conventional.) Here is just one shot of a really nice bit of carpentry for a Newtonian tube that impressed me.

There were some odds and ends on display too including some artifacts from Porter's other work. He developed a garden telescope that was a very artistic small Newtonian that has some resemblance in size to a sundial. In this image you can see the primary mirror and then the little extension that holds the eyepiece. These things are very rare.

Nearby in Springfield is the Hartness House that was the home of Vermont Governor James Hartness back in the 1920's. He was a prolific inventor and was active in the Springfield machine tool industry. He was also a telescope enthusiast and had a turret telescope built onto his house. You can see part of it to the extreme left in this first photo. Today his house is a hotel and the telescope room in the basement is close to the cocktail lounge. There's a museum of telescope making memorabilia on site too. You can see from this image that there have been some additions to the place over the years.

Here's a slightly fuzzy image of the business end of the telescope.

Here are a couple of related links:

Stellafane

Hartness House

Hartness House Telescope and Museum

Porter Turret Telescope Design