Sometime before the end of June, families, government officials, invited guests and astronomy geeks will gather in Stansbury Park, Tooele County, to celebrate the opening of a new feature of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society’s observatories. It will be the fourth big telescope stationed at the site, the Stansbury Park Observatory Complex (SPOC), and the largest of the group.

In fact, the telescope built by Mike Clements dwarfs all other amateur telescopes in the world.

The main mirror is a spectacular glass disk 70 inches across, originally made for an American spy satellite, its surface a wonder of grinding and polishing, its volume a high-technology honeycomb. Weighing 900 pounds, it’s just one component of the gigantic apparatus. With its crane-like structure aimed horizontally, the telescope is 35 feet long, 11 1/2 feet wide and 16 feet high.

A new building to house this magnificent magnifier is under construction. When finished, it will be a rectangular module 45 feet long and 25 feet wide, with walls of concrete (the first eight feet) and steel (the upper ten). The roof’s peak will be 23 feet above the concrete floor. A "garage door" 14 feet wide and 16 feet high will open at the front. For public and private star parties, Clements’ telescope will be rolled out of the building and onto a circular concrete pad.

The story of the new feature has two beginnings, 50 years apart.

** Part 1: The curious boy

Clements, a Salt Lake County resident who is a truck driver, usually following routes from Salt Lake City to Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho, recalled the start of his lifelong interest in astronomy. In the 1960s, when he was about eight or nine years old and living with his parents in Los Angeles, he loved the nighttime. Sneaking around the house after his parents went to bed felt like freedom.

He remembers lying on the couch in the living room, looking out a window and watching the movement of the moon as it changed from night to night. He also tracked something that looked like a bright star but didn’t act like a star. "This object would change positions from night to night in relation to the background. … And it freaked me out. I just thought it was really weird."

He did some research and discovered it was actually the planet Venus.

"Then I was hooked," Clements said. He talked to teachers and learned more about astronomy. His parents took him to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and bought him a planisphere and books about the science. The child decided he needed to build a telescope.

"I didn’t tell him, but I tore apart a pair of my father’s reading glasses and made up some excuse, 'Oh, the dog must have got them.'" He mounted the ill-gotten lenses in a framework of sticks and bicycle spokes, and he and friends propped it up on a park’s picnic table.

"This lens assembly didn’t work very well, although it did function. I did get crude, albeit upside-down, images." At that time he didn’t realize this type of telescope produces inverted views, and thought he had made some mistake. Still, "We were all excited. My gosh, it does something, it magnifies!"

He became interested in reflecting telescopes, the type that uses a mirror to gather light. As a young man he acquired a Cave reflector from a city college that was getting rid of their old equipment and buying newer models. Caves are famous today for their high quality and are much sought-after by astronomers. The one Clements acquired was only about $15. He modified it so it could be easily disassembled and assembled, and packed around on his bike to viewing locations, using a carrying case.

But he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted larger mirrors, which grab more light and make the astronomical object brighter and clearer. In the 1990s he and two friends who are experts in optics, the Utahns Steve Dodds and Vaughn Parsons, built a telescope with a mirror 40 inches in diameter, one of the biggest amateur telescopes at the time. As soon as he peered through it he said it was good -- but not where he wanted it to be. "That was too small."

[Mike Clements stands beside the world's largest amateur telescope, which is mounted on a truck bed. The 70-inch-diameter mirror is to his right, on a rocker device used to aim the instrument. Photograph by Charlie Green]

In 2004, Parsons bought the behemoth mirror for the spy satellite, which the federal government had auctioned off. Officials had rejected it because of a small chip on the side, which doesn’t detract from the viewing, according to Clements.

In one of Parson’s buildings, he examined it in its shipping case. "Of course I was intimidated -- six feet in diameter and a foot thick," he said. The weight would have been about 3,000 pounds if not for the honeycomb design. But 900 pounds was still an enormous mass to deal with.

"I had to have it." The payments stretched over years.

The telescope would be dedicated to visual astronomy, not astrophotography, and Clements was determined to build its framework mostly with easily-acquired material from shops like Lowes, Home Depot and Walmart. A few items had to be machined, such as bearings. He designed it in his free moments during a period when he was driving the truck throughout the country. He brought along sticks and a hot-glue gun and built a model.

"This is clearly, clearly, a case of the saying, 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' I had no concept if this primary mirror would even focus. … I had bought a pig in a poke." He worried that once it was completed, the mirror would turn out to be for a type of astrophotography setup that brings the image to bear on a curved sheet of film, not to a point that can be enlarged by an eyepiece.

"Maybe I was just buying a big slab of glass." But he plunged ahead with the project. At first he  worked in Steve and Cindy Dodds’ garage in Herriman, Salt Lake County. When the structure grew too big he moved it outside. If the telescope didn’t work, he thought, "at least I would have failed in a colossal manner."

When it was nearly complete, the instrument could be tested. Clements tilted down the structure, which was the size of a school bus, and his friend Steve Dodds stood on a slight hill and used a Ronchi device to check the mirror. It came to a focus that was right for an eyepiece, much to Clements' relief. Dodds was able to verify the focal length, information needed so they would know where to place the secondary mirror and the eyepiece mounting.

With a 29-inch flat mirror near the top, the light beam reflects back down toward the observer. At the telescope's highest elevation, a viewer needs to be only about 12 feet off the ground on a ladder. Clements used a paint sprayer and silver spray to make the mirror reflective; because silver tarnishes, it must be recoated periodically.

[Mike Clements and the gigantic telescope he built, its mirror covered by protective gear. Soon it will take up residence in Stansbury Park, Tooele County. Photo by Charlie Green]

At that his first try at observing with the telescope, before he had motorized its slewing, he had to steer the vast device by muscle-power. Although it is balanced on its mount to make movement easier, finding astronomical targets was a task. "This was and still is to this date the largest telescope ever aimed by a single person … physically aiming it by hand." He managed to stumble upon a target, the Swan Nebula.

"Oh, the view, the view!"

At last he had a telescope that showed objects at the scale and brightness he wanted. It was like looking at astronomical photographs, not the faint smudges seen through most amateur 'scopes.

"This is all I was after all along. It took me, I would say, almost a lifetime’s struggle. … This was all I wanted."

Staring at the nebula, he was delighted with "the structure and the image scale, the brightness and the detail."

Charlie Green, a friend of Clements and a member of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, said Jupiter is so large in the eyepiece that its moons look like tennis balls. "The Ring Nebula is huge," Green said, "it takes up the whole eyepiece, it isn’t just a little spot."

[The Ring Nebula, designated Messier 57, a view Joe Bauman took in 2009]

Next: Part 2, the telescope’s new building