Flemming R. Ovesen / Torben Taustrup

Flemming is born in 1950, and I am from 1951. We met in school back in 1965 (the image is from our graduation in 1968. I'm far left - next Flemming, Marianne, Willy, Per and Arne, another of my very good friends), and soon we discovered that we shared a passionate interest in technical things.
At the age of fourteen we bought our first telescopes. It was small telescopes - Flemming bought a 50 mm refractor and I purchased a 42 mm Newtonian - both telescopes on ALT/AZ mounts. We observed the Moon, stars and a bright object that we thought was Jupiter - it was not, as it stood in the northern part of the sky. In those days we had great plans of building a big telescope. We contacted an optometrist and he made an offer on the mirror optics - 300 Dkr. - we did not have that kind of money so the small scopes had to do.

We started building electronic things as well as mechanical devices in Flemming's fathers workshop in the cellar. Among other things we made a 97 cm long model of Jules Vernes legendary "Captain Nemo" submarine "Nautilus" . It's capable of sailing submerged. It's 60 mm propeller is driven by a DC motor. The motor is powered via a wire and a battery on land.

We spent a period of time building model sailplanes. In the beginning it was kits, later we developed our own small fast flying models.

In 1968 we began scuba diving, and in that year we made our first underwater camera. I borrowed my parents old "Ferrania" box camera and fitted it into a cookie can - this is one of the first pictures taken with this camera. Later we made an aluminium submersible box for my Konica C35 - 24 x 36 camera, and image quality improved.

In 1969 TOC (Taustrup Ovesen Cooperation) was established - we found it quite amusing to have a "company" to relate to. To make it official we made a document stating the statutes of our partnership. In short it describes how to divide the expenses and what kinds of things we should spend our time with - things that we found interesting of course. The document is still in our possesion - actually, it's framed and hanging on the wall.

Flemming and Torben anno 1969

For a period of years we did nothing about astronomy, but in 1985 we got together again and made plans for building a "big" scope - a Newtonian. We began building the instrument the same year - our goal was to observe, and hopefully take pictures of Comet Halley with it. However, constructing the telescope took a lot more time than we expected, and we missed Halley by a year or so.