(April 30, 2019 at 11:59 pm)Jackalope Wrote: After doing a couple of them, I decided that there were far better mirrormakers than I, and given the sheer amount of time required to grind and figure a parabola or even a flat, I would pay someone else to do it. My enjoyment was more doing the woodworking and mechanicals, sometimes having to invent ways to do things using what I had available. The last one I did was a 12.5" f/4.5 truss tube design made from baltic birch and aluminum, and it would have taken forever to grind that deep of a parabola on that big of a piece of glass. Screw that.
Well crap, we should have been rich! We could have made a nice, really big parabolic reflector using mercury and spinning it, to make a parabolic shape. Of course, it has to be on the earth for the gravitational acceleration and centrifugal reaction to make a nice parabola.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_mirror_telescope
If you get to thinking you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.
