Edward Byers

BROOKE SELF
STAFF WRITER
BARSTOW • In a lime green building off of Old Highway 58 a world-renowned telescope machinist works masterfully at his craft.
Edward Byers, 85, has been in the telescope industry for more than 50 years specializing in telescope mountings, gears and driving systems.
He holds four patents and his past clientele are a lengthy list including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT, Lockheed Martin, the National Security Agency, U.S. Bureau of Standards and the Royal College Observatory in England. He boasts creating the largest heliostat in Canada and the largest refractor telescope in the state of Florida.
“Astronomy is the oldest science,” he explains. “People have been looking at the stars before they did anything else.”
One of his current projects includes a pair of binoculars that span about 6 feet in length and will be the only giant pair of binoculars designed for the human eye, he said. On this particular day he is building a 48-inch cassegrain telescope. Like all big telescopes, it’s a mirror telescope, he explains.
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