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How do you build a mirror for one of the world's biggest telescopes?
- hanniabu 11y agoThese a How It's Made episode on building 30ft mirror. From a mechanical engineering background, I must say that it's a truly amazing process. Tried looking it up but was unfortunately unable to find.
- 3princip 11y agoThe video in this article is also fascinating.
- vlehto 11y ago"A mirror much larger than eight meters, made of a single piece of glass, would be too expensive and too hard to handle." Glass was used 20 years ago because it has favorable stiffness to weight ratio. Change to carbon fiber was speculated, but it's not transparent and it would be more difficult to polish. Carbon fiber backed glass might be the future.
- DanBC 11y agoIf you're interested in the handling of very large telescope mirrors (8 meters) here's a nice video of the mirror from the very large telescope array in Chile being removed, transported, cleaned, re-surfaced, and put back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkV8RRRu7gE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkV8RRRu7gE
- IvyMike 11y agoThe use of silly putty as a self-shaping polishing disk is ingenious. Link from the article: "Rigid conformal polishing tool using non-linear visco-elastic effect" https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-3-2242 https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-3-22...