[ATM] cylindrical mirror grinding

["Jess Tauber" <phonosemantics@earthlink.net>]

Hi. I wrote several months ago expressing my interest in gradient index optics-  but this is a different topic here. Does anyone on the ATM list have any practical experience grinding/polishing cylindrical mirrors, especially figuring them to parabolic and hyperbolic cross-sections? Even optical companies only rarely make these- I recently saw one advertized by Edmund. But I'm more interested in making relatively large ones as telescope primaries and secondaries, and also thin at that (the ones I've seen from companies tend to be thick and on heavy mounts). I may have a while back mentioned that there were few references to this sort of thing on the WWW with regard to telescope optics- recently a fellow in India whose university group is trying to make large scale cylindrical mirrors sent me an offprint from a journal article laying out the design and equations, but apparently they have had less success actually making a workable model. They are also only interested in observatory scopes, not ones for amateurs, as I am, and are thus rather more limited in their design parameters than I am.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@earthlink.net
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