On 9/30/2012 11:45 PM, Kirk Wallace wrote: > I'm playing with the thought of putting a vacuum deposition system > together to coat telescope mirrors with aluminum. It looks like I could Kirk:
I forgot to ask. What's the biggest mirror you contemplate coating? On the one hand, that's a technical question since it affects the sizing of the vacuum chamber, vacuum pumps, and the coating mechanism, and also affects one's ability to coat the mirror uniformly. On the other hand, it's purely personal curiosity. My long-ago partner in astronomical crimes and I never managed to grind anything bigger than an 8in dia. mirror for a classic Newtonian reflecting telescope. The optical figure wasn't great and we used wet chemistry to silver the mirror so it wasn't so great either. Fortunately, the seeing conditions in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico in the late-1950s, early-1960s were superb and even our crappy scope could give us a number of thrills. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
