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Washing primary mirrors
Hi,
After doing a lot of research here on the forum and elsewhere I came to these conclusions from it all:
- washing if carefully carried out does no damage. The method is found here on IIS
- there is no point to washing the mirror frequently as it takes more than just a bit of visible contamination before performance is noticably degraded
- some types of contamination such as seaside salt air deposits and cockatoo poop do need to be removed quickly
I have washed my main mirrors twice and could detect no damage caused by this.
Distilled water is evaporated to steam and then condensed again and therefore should have no minerals or dissolved materials in it, but unless also filtered it could have a little dust in it.
Demineralised water is passed through a series of resins which remove dissolved materials, and then a membrane which filters out solids, even down to bacteria depending on the standard used.
I don't believe there is any effective difference for mirror rinsing, but I'd be interested in other comments.
Cheers
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