Re: (ATM) Foucault testing technique

Clay Spence x3039 (cds@peanut.sarnoff.com)
Tue, 22 Aug 1995 09:22:18 +0500

There's such a thing as systematic error, too. Just averaging a bunch of repeated measurements will reduce random measurement error, but not the systematic errors. I'm not sure what they would be. For a long-focus mirror, a person might tend to move the knife edge a minimum distance, thus tending to make all readings a little large. Or the random errors might not be evenly distributed on both sides of the correct displacement for a long-focus mirror, so the average will come out biased toward too large a displacement.

Clay Spence cspence@sarnoff.com