About Us

Peter is chief optical engineer at Zerochromat and creator of the Newise family of astronomical telescopes. Born in Middlesex, he qualified as an industrial chemist and spent five years working for ICI before going to work in South Africa in 1974. With a life-long interest in astronomy, Peter bought a mirror making kit with a view to making his own optics.

The fabulous South African skies proved instrumental in getting Peter hooked on designing and building telescopes. After making several Newtonians, a Schiefspiegler and a 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, Peter donated these instruments to the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa before returning to the U.K. in 1983. He has been manufacturing telescopes commercially ever since.

John Wall needs no introduction to telescope makers as his reputation as an optical innovator is known the world over. He is a Horace Dall medalist, awarded by the British Astronomical Association for his telescope making achievements. John showed an aptitude for engineering at an early age and at sixteen won an apprenticeship with Vickers Armstrong at Crayford, Greater London. Whilst serving in the army with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, he credits seeing a 12-inch equatorially mounted telescope at the Festival of Britain in 1952 as starting a passion for optics and telescope making that exists to this day.

John eventually became a designer at Vickers and it was here, in 1968, that he conceived the Crayford Eyepiece Mount, now universally known as the Crayford focuser. He wrote about it in the BAA Journal and presented the device to the astronomical community. The 1960s also saw John becoming increasingly interested in dialyte systems, research that culminated in an optically folded 30-inch f/12 refractor just 12 feet long in 1999. He discovered the retrofocal dialyte concept central to the Zerochromat, the culmination of a lifetime's work in experimental optics.