My new optics ideas and one from Bill Kelly, a man who passed

[Daveskywill (David)]

Hello all:

Bill Kelly, a man from Arizona, an astronomer, a man who was into

oceanography, and had been in WWII passed away going on a year ago

from this February.

And as he did he had a new inventive idea he called the "Flex" mirror system.

He had a new idea, in ATM'ing, of making the primary only spherical and then

epoxying a bolt on the back, flexing it, putting it into a parabolic shape

from there.

He even may have successfully made or at least talked about this over

the phone of making a scope that could be flexed through different

focal lengths. This could be used for a scope, a monocular, and a

microscope. Or bino-telescope, binoculars, and stereoscopic microscope.

It sounded cool to me.

I'm just wondering about how marketable something like this could be?

David

[rainwatcher (Peter)]

A lateral thinker - i love it when people come up with ideas like this, even when they dont work. It forces us all to explore new paths.

First thought is the final shape would not necessaraly be parabolic, at the level of curvature required all sorts of tiny imperfections and the action of the bolt itself would be a problem. It may be of course the first mirror with a turned down centre

[Daveskywill (David)]

So after that idea of flexing mirrors was presented to me;

now I got to thinking about if we could make special lenses that

have a front and back, usual, solid coating, but then in the middle

change it's curvature by flexing it (maybe by pumping a certain optical

fluid in or out).

Of course if you could combine an optical train of flexed mirrors and flexed

refractive optics, you could probably have quite a system; variable focal

length, variable zoom, you probably wouldn't have to worry about

vignetting and so forth.


Also here's another one: I'm wondering about a variable-angle star

diagonal, mirror thing. This one I pretty much came up with myself.

The idea is getting a flat mirror to be turned at different angles and

keep the eyepiece holder (closer to you) at the appropriate reflective

angle. At first I was thinking of 2 pulleys, one lower (fixed) and one

up at the high end, this last would adjust the angle of the eyepiece

holder. The two pulleys would be connected by a cable thing (it might

be sprocketed so it wouldn't slip) and it's twisted. This is so when this

mirror thingy is lowered, the eyepiece holder thing is at the appropriate

angle. I see that this would work alright for right-angle and then

starting shallower. But after awhile you see there's a problem (the light

cone angle, of scope and focal plane). This would make it impractical

for a total variable angle all the way form right angle to straight-through.

However with some engineering it could likely be done.

I can send a few CAD pictures on this, dimonstrating this pulley, action.



PS: like they say necessity is the mother of invention. And these ideas

could be very useful. Any ideas or advice?

David

[graham.hobart (Graham stevens)]

This flexible thing is how the lens of your eyeball works- a biconvex lens which can narrow or widen to adjust the refractive properties.
Graham

[A23649 (Nathan)]

maybe for the flexi-lens you could do something like this?
http://www.technologyreview.com/tomarket/21274/

[Daveskywill (David)]

If we could make up a system (or an eyepiece) that had a combination of these convex and some concave, even, lenses and they could be flexed
and then have them mounted seperately on some sliding aperatus thing, we could make quite a system.

We could change the spacing on them.

I guess this thing that pumps the optical liquid could be seperate to each
lens and moved with it.

It might though be hard to design a clear-enough, firm but not too firm outer lens shell. And then if you distorted it, if it would make, like a ripple effect and that would disturb the final image. I guess something could be done to cancel that effect if it was to be used only for imaging.

[allan gould]

Read about something like this in Sky and Telescope where a mirror was distorted using a bolt epoxied onto the back and tightening it flexed the mirror until a perfect or better figure and thus image resulted