Tonight, Jim K essentially completed his 8″ telescope by putting in the primary mirror, positioning it correctly in the tube by focusing it on the Moon, and achieved FIRST LIGHT!

He also put on the Telrad finderscope and used it to aim the scope accurately on the star Capella with no difficulty at all. I did a brief star-test on that star and found that the scope passed with flying colors! Jim started grinding the mirrors back in the 1970s, put it aside, and brought it to us for help in doing the final polishing, figuring, aluminizing, and designing and constructing the telescope. It looks great and works well, too!

In addition, Pratik T may have finished figuring his 6″ f/8 mirror that he’s been working on. Using the Foucault/Couder knife-edge test measurements I made, the program FigureXP declared it to be 1/4 lambda error on the wavefront. This may be good enough, but more testing would be a good idea, later on.

We are closed all of next week for the holiday.