Knoll × Celestron

Announced September 22, 1970, at the Knoll showroom on Park Avenue, the 3795 began with a complaint from Warren Platner, a keen amateur observer, that every good telescope he had owned lived in the garage because its tripod looked like surveying equipment. Knoll had put his rod furniture into lobbies across the country, and Tom Johnson had just started building the Celestron 8 in Torrance. Johnson agreed to supply optical tubes, forks and drives; Platner would design everything beneath them. Knoll numbered it in the 37 series, with the tables, on the grounds that it had a glass top.

The pier is a Platner table base stretched to 70 cm: nickel-plated steel rods welded between two rings, flaring at both ends and pinched at the waist. Triangulated, it proved stiffer than Celestron's own tripod, which Johnson established by tapping the tube and timing how long Saturn shook in the eyepiece. Above it sits a white enamelled drum in the manner of Saarinen's Pedestal base, holding the clock drive, its top sliced at an angle so that the drum itself is the equatorial wedge. Latitude is set at the factory for the buyer's city, and adjusted afterwards with an Allen key that Platner insisted be kept in a felt-lined slot under the glass, where nobody could find it.

Celestron kept its orange tube and black corrector ring. Platner had asked for white, then gave way after seeing the orange against nickel under showroom spots, and specified instead a fitted day cover in charcoal Knoll Textiles wool. The Vignelli office redrew the setting circles in Helvetica, which made them easier to read and, according to one Celestron machinist, no more accurate. Interiors called it the first scientific instrument designed to be seen with the lights on. A reader's letter to Sky & Telescope praised the optics and asked why a telescope needed a bronze glass shelf.

The shelf was for the eyepieces, which sit in five recesses lined in the same orange wool as a Platner lounge chair. Several owners report using them for cufflinks.