Telescopes
After more than 20 years I finally finished the 1.1 meter telescope. It is housed in an 18′ dome on my property. It makes scientific observations every clear night mostly of white dwarf stars with colliding asteroids around them. I gave a 1 hour talk on the multi-decade construction of the telescope that you can see here: SAS Talk Video
Here is my 44″ diameter telescope mirror on the grinding machine. It is 6 inches thick and weights about 900 lbs. This mirror is very deep in the middle as you can see on the right. This makes it particularly hard to polish perfectly and we used a special interferometer to measure the surface to one millionth of an inch.
The smallest but hardest working telescope. This is a 300mm camera lens attached to a high performance astronomical CCD. It is used to look for exoplanets crossing in front of their stars which dims the light just enough to be detected. It was mounted in the dome while the 1.1 meter was in progress.
I accumulated two telescopes in the 90’s and like all good hobbies you start small and work your way up. Shown below is my Meade 16″ and 10″. These telescopes are completely computer controlled so I can sit in my living room and point them around the sky. The 16″ was the first amateur telescope to measure the radial velocity of an exoplanet. Link
