Cold War Spoils: Amateur Builds Telescope With 70-Inch Lens

First time accepted submitter 192_kbps writes "Mike Clements, a long-haul trucker from West Jordan, Utah, built the largest amateur telescope ever with a whopping 70 inch primary mirror he purchased at auction. The entire telescope is 35 feet tall, 900 pounds, and he hopes to tour it in parks. As a hand-turned Dobsonian the telescope lacks the photographic capacity and tracking required for professional astronomy but the views must be breathtaking." (Are there other compelling candidates out there for "largest amateur telescope ever"? The 71" scope listed by nitesky.org appears to be dormant.)

Comments

Re:Did he buy the mirror, or make it?

[pla]

I took that to mean they just cancelled the satellite project after casting and polishing the mirror but before silvering it.

Alternatively, the intended use may have involved some classified exotic coating that serves some special purpose and they needed to strip the coating before selling the mirror at auction.

Re:Isn't there even one picture through it?

[careysub]

Taking short exposures and processing them on a computer is the "poor man's adaptive optics". A very powerful technique (if the object is bright enough) is too take a large number (thousands) of short exposures, then sort through them for a "lucky" image - one in which the atmosphere is momentarily stable. Multiple lucky images can be stacked together to get longer exposures. This really is a very powerful technique, not requiring extremely expensive high precision tracking hardware.