Re: [ATM] the future of amateur telescope making and amateurastronomy

[Dominic-Luc Webb <dlwebb@canit.se>]

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Kowalski, Mark S wrote:

> As nano technologies are put into production, the traditional glass
> primary mirror will be replaced by a thin, metallic, reflective film
> that floats above a nano electrostatic array.  The array will be managed
> by a CPU to maintain it in a parabolic shape and automatically correct
> for environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, air currents).
> Similarly, the secondary mirror will be a thin film floating in mid-air
> (no spider) and maintained flat by an array in the cage.  'course, this
> will first come to fruition in products released by Celestron-Meade.
>
> Mark

I note that there is a tendency (my lab included) to go for the
latest high tech instruments. They are fantastically complicated,
with components produces by hundreds if not thousands of high
tech companies. The price for each data point has in some cases
risen drammatically, while the quality of data and underlying
scientific reasoning has sometimes been inferior. I often fall
back to techniques from the mid to late 1800's, or sometimes as
recent as 1950's. This has been because we simply could not ever
get the actual science done with the latest high tech toy. Sadly,
big research labs do not often run cost/benefit analysis. We also
rarely discuss if we can answer a question with existing
techniques. This is partly because our lives revolve around
impact factors and getting into "top" journals has turned into
something of a Hollywood production where one needs to show
off flashy Powerpoint presentations of findings with instruments
that sometimes seem to reflect budget more than scientific
achievement.

An engineering friend of mine once explained to me that an
optimal design includes features like minimal components
and minimal interdepencies between components, particularly
when they are manufactured by different entities.

ATM's are not driven by the same forces that large research
facilities are, and can/will opt for cost effectiveness. I
anticipate ATMs in the future will find ways to adapt some
high tech techniques such that they are cost effective for an
amateur budget, but I am a bit skeptical about replacing glass
that we currently use for multicomponent computer-driven
optics (maybe a few people will find a niche for special
cases). Glass really is a remarkable material for
telescopes and has passed the test of time. I expect most will
be content with glass, as is.

I could envision that the type of glass we use might change.
I could also envision that improved manufacturing techniques
and increased competition in the market might make telescope
mirrors so cheap that ATMs may have little reason to produce
some of the more common configs. With such off-the shelf
optics, maybe ATMs will be spending more energy on configuring
their systems for specialized applications. For instance,
quite a few of us could be measuring Doppler shifts if our
scopes were configured to do so, and there have been some
real scientific breakthroughs using this technique.

That being said, I think there might be a trend in the future
for emphasis to shift to peripheral attachments for scopes to
do various photometric measurements. While many ATMs make
mirrors, few make eyepieces. Price, quality and difficulty in
making eyepieces from scratch favored buying off-the-shelf
eyepieces. The same might happen to primary mirrors. I would
guess things will change towards assembling more complex
scopes from modular off-the-shelf commercial components.

With the Internet, there might be a trend towards automation in
order to place scopes at remote locations and/or for scopes in
different locations to be linked. Cheap mass produced mirrors
would favor this.

As an aside, I note that both Celestron and Meade have been
having some serious money problems. I recently bought a
no-name brand 60X spotting scope for so little money and
such good quality I could not justify building my own
scope of similar aperture and F/ratio. I also could not
find a reason for the added expense of an equivalent Celestron
or Meade. There was no shortage of fittings to attach common
commercial cameras, and digital cameras with removable lenses
can be had cheap. It seems to be getting easier, cheaper and
more versatile to assemble a very good scope from off-the-shelf
parts, which makes me suspect that few people will still be
pushing glass a few years from now, albeit they will
nonetheless still be using glass.

Dominic-Luc Webb

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