Re: [Phys-L] sun path diagram

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 8/11/22 2:56 PM, John Denker via Phys-l wrote:

> On 8/11/22 2:26 PM, Prof. Keith S. Taber via Phys-l wrote:
>
> > Tucson, Arizona!? I know it is a real place, but it just makes me
> > smile.
>
> It's a real place, with real astronomers.
>
> https://noirlab.edu/public/programs/kitt-peak-national-observatory/
>
> https://mgio.arizona.edu/

Also a very respectable optical science program:
  https://www.optics.arizona.edu/

  https://mirrorlab.arizona.edu/

> These mirrors represent a radical departure from the conventional
> solid-glass mirrors used in the past. They have a honeycomb structure
> on the inside; made out of Ohara E6-type borosilicate glass that is
> melted, molded and spun cast into the shape of a paraboloid in a
> custom-designed rotating oven. Honeycomb mirrors offer the advantages
> of their solid counterparts - rigidity and stability - but they can
> be significantly larger, and dramatically lighter.
>
> The Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab team has developed a revolutionary
> new method to polish the honeycomb mirrors with a deeply curved,
> parabolic surface that results in much shorter focal lengths than
> conventional mirrors.
>
> The pioneering work being done today at the Mirror Lab had its
> beginning around 1980 with a backyard experiment by Dr. Roger Angel,

Roger Angel is a seriously smart dude.

Once I was at a conference with a bunch of famous computer
scientists who were discussing their ideas for building a
massively parallel computer using a bucket of microprocessors.
They wondered whether it would work, and what it would take
to program it.

On the last day Roger Angel gave a talk, reporting that he had
already done it. Not because that was his area of research,
but because he needed to do it as one tiny component of his
adaptive mirror scheme, to dynamically compensate for "seeing"
i.e. turbulence in the upper atmosphere.

It was one of those skateboard-meets-Harley moments.

====================

Back when I was in high school, I took a bunch of math courses
at U of A night school and summer school. There was no such
thing as "community college" back then, and HS math courses
would have been a big waste. They weren't real happy about
letting HS students enroll. There's a funny story about that.