Fall
The mirror and three semi loads of equipment and furniture made the trip to Sierra Vista AZ. We are about 10 miles from the border at 4500 feet under dark skies. This will be the permanent home for the Spectrashift Observatories on 19 acres.
The secondary mirror and corrector lenses have been ordered for the 1.1 meter. Once we have all the optics we will set them up in a static mount for testing the image quality.
Spring
Third try, we are now up against a deadline to move to Arizona. The mirror is about 1/2 wave RMS which is not terrific but may be usable. The mirror came out with a trefoil shape which we now know is typical for large mirrors. We computerized the mirror rotation and worked the high spots both under software and hand polishing. The results were not great but the humps are smaller. We are attempting to simulate the image quality through software to decide to stop or not.
Winter
Things have gone bad TWICE on the mirror figure. First time we put the groove in it and could not get it out, so we had to back up to a sphere and start again. The Ronchi-gram is below.
Second go around the mirror was astigmatic so again we went back to a sphere and started over.
