LightSight

And so it begins. The epic journey through the fields of science and engineering. At the crossroads of the unimaginably huge scale of the universe and the impossibly small margin of error in the nanometer range, this project pushes the limits of human capability. Yet even more daunting is the task to bring these monolithic objectives into easy reach of the everyday astronomer. We are Light Sight; a conglomeration of members from the Hackerspace MAG Laboratory. Our team members are from every walk of life and have banded together to construct a machine which can manufacture telescope mirrors. We do this so that the public has a cheap and readily available supply of telescope mirrors for their use in near Earth object identification (objects such as comets and asteroids). The machine operates by casting a parabolic film of epoxy in a spinning bowl. The epoxy as a liquid forms into a nearly perfect parabola then hardens. This surface is then vacuum metalized with aluminum in order to apply an incredibly shiny mirrored coating and can be used as a telescope primary mirror. Now we just need to build it.

Archived

This Project's webpage has been archived and is available at MAGLab Archives LightSight page