Very nice posting!... - and good explanation of the effct of visual interferometric astronomy (The CHARA array). It's a very cool kind of science - being able to collect ultra sharp images of far away objects (albeit a bit dim, but the resolving power is what CHARA is all about!).
Feel free to ask any questions about my 'scope you might have.
The basics of it are: It's a hand-made telescope, a Coulter Odyssey II, Newtonian design, with a 17 inch diamter main mirror. The mirror was hand-figgured and polished to within "one 16th-lambda" meaning that it distorts light less than one-16th of a wavelength of visible light - pretty remarkable for a hand-figured glass! The focusing mount is a rack-and-pinon mount, built for 2" eye pieces (with an insert for 1.25" eye pieces). It is aimed with a "Telrad" reflex heads-up sighting system - there's a small window you look through, onto which a "bulls-eye" like target is projected. You can see the sky through the window, and you just line-up the thing you want to see in the middle of the bulls-eye.
The mounting is a "Dobsonian" mount, meaning it's an alt-az mount (up-down, and left-right), and there are no motors so it's completely manually guided.
Under dark skies, i've managed to see over 90 of the Messier Objects in one night, including many galaxies in the Virgo cluster that are not in the Messier listings.
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Date: 2005-11-23 08:14 pm (UTC)From:Feel free to ask any questions about my 'scope you might have.
The basics of it are: It's a hand-made telescope, a Coulter Odyssey II, Newtonian design, with a 17 inch diamter main mirror. The mirror was hand-figgured and polished to within "one 16th-lambda" meaning that it distorts light less than one-16th of a wavelength of visible light - pretty remarkable for a hand-figured glass! The focusing mount is a rack-and-pinon mount, built for 2" eye pieces (with an insert for 1.25" eye pieces). It is aimed with a "Telrad" reflex heads-up sighting system - there's a small window you look through, onto which a "bulls-eye" like target is projected. You can see the sky through the window, and you just line-up the thing you want to see in the middle of the bulls-eye.
The mounting is a "Dobsonian" mount, meaning it's an alt-az mount (up-down, and left-right), and there are no motors so it's completely manually guided.
Under dark skies, i've managed to see over 90 of the Messier Objects in one night, including many galaxies in the Virgo cluster that are not in the Messier listings.