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Re: Cylindrical mirrors



I'm looking for a source of cylindrical mirrors for use in an introductory
optics lab. Does anyboy have any suggestions?

I use large ferrotype tins and rolls of aluminized mylar.
I am very interested in what you are doing with them in
the undergraduate laboratory. Cylindrical mirrors are
fascinating, but they are almost never treated in texts
even though they are commonly encountered every day in
real life. I am particularly interested in the image you
sees in a vertical concave cylindrical mirror. If you
look at yourself in such a mirror you can see an erect
but minified image which has very interesting properties.
It is reversed like the 90 degree dihedral mirror but it
is otherwise quite different from that image. To start
with, it is not longitudinally localized - it is neither
"real" nor "virtual", demonstrating that those attributes
of images are more conventional than physical. (It is my
belief that this distinction is drawn solely for didactic
purposes. How's that for iconoclasm?)

Take that concave cylindrical mirror (a bent ferrotype
tin is what I use) and rotate it about the visual axis
axis while watching your image. A similar thing happens
with the dihedral mirror, of course, but it is lovely!

Leigh