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Troy,
Thanks for the compliments.
My background is mechanical engineering. Optical design is self thought, based on an early interest in optics going back to my primary school years.
Talking of optics, I have nearly finished grinding the mangin mirror for this project. I have been scratching my head for a long time trying to come up with a procedure that is not too difficult and will result in a usable optic.
The main problem is the big hole in the middle, as it causes all sorts of difficulties.
I decided to polish and figure the front surface with the "plug" still attached by a couple of millimetres of glass. That should help with the testing, and the polishing can be done with a normal full lap. After that I will finish the trepanning and I will do a precision cylindrical grinding operation on the internal diameter. Hopefully not too much residual stress will be released and the front (finished) surface will cope better with a bit of distortion, being a refractive surface, even though it works in a double pass mode. The second surface will be done with a full diameter polisher that will have its centre dug out to match the hole in the mirror. Testing of the second surface will be difficult.
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