Re: [ATM] 7 inch spherical mirror

["Francis J. O'Reilly" <foreilly@verizon.net>]

And a terrible shame it was as Ritchey, this dour shop teacher from the 
Midwest, in my estimation, was probably the greatest telescope optician that 
has lived to date.

My dream is to rent a half an evening on the sixty inch someday,
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Harbour" <stainless_steel@suddenlink.net>
To: "David Weinshenker" <daze39@earthlink.net>; "ATM List" <atm@atmlist.net>
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:16 PM
Subject: Re: [ATM] 7 inch spherical mirror


> Yes he did. He invented the method, in his head, while on shipboard with
> Walter Adams. I have no idea where they were going. Adams was ecstatic 
> when
> Schmidt announced that he had perfected, conceptually, his "elegant
> solution" for making the corrector. Schmidt himself predicted that likely
> the upper limit for a corrector plate would be 48". Amazing.
>
> Walter Adams and George E. Hale burned Ritchey down, according to the book
> by Donald Osterbrock, "Ritchey, Hale, and Big American Telescopes". How 
> sad.
> (Amazing book; worth getting on "interlibrary loan" if one can find it);
> previously unpublished pictures of Ritchey's drawings, and his first ever 
> .5
> meter Ritchey Chretian reflector (fork mounted, of course). Picture, if
> anyone wants it. Tube is so short that it looks like a box, with four X's 
> on
> each side. Pictures of his 6 metre plan, too, and also the tower 
> telescopes.
> Stumping for money for this network of monster telescopes when Hale was
> trying to find money for the 5 meter was the last straw for Hale; so he
> blackballed Ritchey very, very thoroughly.
>
> R-101
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Weinshenker" <daze39@earthlink.net>
> To: "ATM List" <atm@atmlist.net>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 8:49 AM
> Subject: Re: [ATM] 7 inch spherical mirror
>
>
>> Dominic-Luc Webb wrote:
>>> Does anyone know for sure that Schmidt ever used a vacuum
>>> method?
>>
>> The accounts I have seen of the history of the Schmidt-type telescope
>> (e.g, Henry C. King's "The History of the Telescope", p. 357; Ronald
>> Florence's "The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope, p. 259.)
>> are consistent on the point that he shaped the corrector plate by drawing
>> a vacuum behind a glass disk and polishing a flat surface on the exposed
>> face of the slightly-flexed disk.
>>
>> -dave w
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>
>
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