Re: [ATM] Cutting glass into large circles

["Bob May" <rmay@nethere.com>]

There's a picture of me on the RTMC website for the Merit Awards
of 1998 adjusting the telescope for first light of the scope.
Remember that back in the days of before Foucault, the telescopes
were measured in focal length, not the aperture as the primary
designation of the telescope.  The aperture on my scope is 4.25"
and the focal length is approximately 200" so asa a result, I can
put the lens of that scope on one edge of the Hale scope and
focus at the other side of the telescope!  Just worked out that
way.  To get a good field of view, I ended up building my own
eyepieces of the Hyugens designowith 3" tubes.  I even made up an
adapter (which has been used, BTW) so I can use Al Nagler's
little eyepieces.
I was at an TMC a few years ago and Mercury and Venus were in the
evening sky so I gabe views of Mercury with it and it was very
interesting to note that the viewing was good enough that I could
see the nice thin crescent of Mercury while other, muich less
focal length scopes were just showing a blob for the most part.
Benus was more like the mmoon in its appearanceand you could see
the full disks of both planets in the eyepiece. IIRC, I was using
100 power that day.
FWIW, the moon takes up almost all of the eyepiece vcview and
most of the visitors that saw the moon on that first light day
had trouble seeing it (it was late afternoon when vviewing
started and the moon was just a smudge in the afternoon sky)
until they got to the right place behind the eyepiece.
My lowest power eyepiece is of 8" focal length (25x) and has
about four inches of eye relief!
I'll also note that the scope is extremely stable to bumping and
you can easily hold the eyepiece end of the scope and get nice
stable views of things.
Bob May
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