Thursday, August 27, 2009

The Project Begins

The Project began at the school table this morning. We are going to grind a 6" f/8 mirror and put it in a Dobsonian mount. I began by telling them that we will be able to see the a couple of miles of the Moon at a time, see the divisions in the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus to build their excitement.

We then went over the basics of grinding the mirror. I emphasized the precision of the mirror, which made Anna a bit nervous since she is fearful of making a mistake. I relieved her anxiety that the errors between 3 careful grinders will average out and should actually produce a mirror with greater precision.

We then went over the need for a very stable stand to grind the mirror on. We followed this up with a trip to Lowe's to get the materials to build our stand.

Tomorrow I will post pictures of the stand and its building.

As Jack Horkheimer says, "Keep looking up."
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Naming a Blog

Choosing a name for a blog is very difficult and fraught with dangers, but in consulting with Mary Kathryn, my dear bride, we decided on "Kenning through Astronomy Divine."

The name comes from Meditation 6 by Edward Taylor, a New England Puritan, pastor, and physician. Every week he walked hunderds of miles to tend to his flock and care for the sick, and he still had time to be a prolific writer.

About Our Project

In 1978, when I was 12, I bought a book on telescope making at Davis Planetarium in Jackson, MS. It started me on a quest to grind my own telescope mirror. Two years later I order a 6 inch mirror blank and abrasives from Edmund's Scientific only to be crushed when the blank arrived without the abrasives. Edmund's had stopped carrying them. Over the next 30 years, I had thought about grinding that mirror that I had been carrying around for so long. Now as part of a homeschool Astronomy class with my children, we will complete a project 32 years in the making. I hope you all enjoy following our progress in this. We hope that it culminates in February or March with a West Virginia Star Party that will include some of my nieces and nephews.

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