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Trust me, it's a testament to the power of image processing... :-)
I did check visually, and it was possible to see a lot of this detail through the eyepiece at 200x, but it was all a lot smaller than the view through the laptop.
I have a "closed tube" system, and I think it allows a stable column of air to settle around the mirror. The tube is closed behind the mirror by the peltier cooling setup. The downside to this approach is that I depend completely on active cooling to drive the heat out of the mirror, as there is no natural convection.
I think it's a good system, but it's very different to the conventional wisdom of "openness" around the mirror for cooling. The conventional approach does not work in Canberra because there is just too much temperature difference between day and night - air cooling can't keep up.
I have a system of 4 sensors that measure the temperature (2 on the mirror, 1 on the metal of the tube, and 1 in the outside air) and my laptop can switch the peltier cooling on and off as needed to keep the mirror at the same temperature as the outside air.
Have I mentioned how much I like aluminium for tube material? It just tracks ambient air temperature very closely, much better than other metals or white painted tubes which will "supercool" several degrees below ambient.
Bird
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