by skygeex » Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:13 am
We once visited the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona. We certainly visited on the right day, because Dean Ketelsen let us walk on one of the Large Binocular Telescope's (LBT) polished mirror glasses. This mirror has not yet been silvered. It's just the glass. They had specialized instrumentation trained on it from above that displayed the deviations from perfect curvature, in tolerances of single wavelengths! The girl you see on the glass here, Jennifer Polakis, laid down on her back on the glass for about 2 minutes. She got up, climbed back down the ladder, and when we looked at the computer display, we could see the outline of her body. It wasn't the latent heat signature we were seeing. It was actually a 100 Angstrom deformity in the glass from her body having lied there! Fantastic visit!
<img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/skygeex/SLH3fzsyGNI/AAAAAAAABFQ/uF5Mu-MGHRE/s800/Standing_on_the_LGB_Mirror.jpg" />
Hope that embed comes through!
-C