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Category Archives: Telescope Making

First Time Installation of OnStep Board with NEMA23 Stepper Motors in Ealing Mount at Hopewell

03 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, science, Telescope Making

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ATM, Bob Bolster, dobsonian, Hopewell Observatory, Howard Dutton, OnStep, OnStep Conversion, Telescope

A 3-minute video of the results of our first-time installation of something called an OnStep conversion. We are replacing the telescope drive of a venerable but beautifully machined telescope mount, located at a small group-owned observatory called Hopewell, atop a ridge called Bull Run Mountain*.

It’s alive!

Sorry, it’s not the greatest or clearest video. Also, I mistakenly state at about 0:25 in the video that the right ascension axis was turning at 12 RPM, but it’s not: I should have said 5 RPM, or one revolution in 12 seconds.

You can hear some stuttering of one of the motors. You are right, that is not a good sound. We were able to get it to stop and start making that noise and motion by adjusting the precise positioning of some of the gears. It will take some time and experimentation to get that perfect.

Later on (not captured in this video), when I was trying to slew in the declination axis at the highest speed possible, the stepper motor once again screamed and halted. I’m hopeful that all of those problems can be fixed by doing one or more of these things:

  • 1) adjusting the fit of all those gears;
  • (2) changing certain parameters of microstepping and current to the stepper motors in software; and/or
  • (3) increasing the voltage to the board from 18 VDC to 24 VDC.

I’ll need to test things out on my desk at home, using the same OnStep board, but without the gears and timing belt. (That stuff was a royal PITA to remove screw back into place, and none of us have any desire to take them back out again!) I have some identical extra stepper motors that I can test out, with gloved hands, to see if it is possible to stop the motors from turning. Right now, I still don’t think they are putting out the amount of torque needed.

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

*Yes, that famous Bull Run of Civil War fame is not far away. However, our observatory is named after a different geological feature, namely the Hopewell Gap that cuts through the hard rock of Bull Run Mountain right about where where the creek called Little Bull Run begins.

If you are reading this, you probably know that serious amateur, and all professional, astronomical telescopes (except for Dobs) are generally driven by ‘clock drives’ so that the object one is viewing or photographing stays properly centered as the earth rotates imperceptibly beneath us. The original Ealing motor drive at Hopewell, while turning excellent Ed Byers gears, had been an intermittent problem ever since it was delivered to the University of Maryland about 50 years ago. It was in fact not operational when they sold it to us for a pittance about 30 years ago. (If you go to the University of Maryland Observatory site I linked to, the scope we have now is the one in the center of the 1970s – era photo labeled ‘Figure 4’.)

Bob Bolster, one of the founding members of Hopewell observatory, disassembled the drive, modified it considerably, and got it working again, several years before I joined the group. The scope worked, off and on, with a very complex clutch system for ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ movement of the scope, for most of the rest of the last 25 or so years, except for occasional motor burnouts and clutch replacements. Also unfortunately, the optics on the original 12″ Ritchey-Chretien telescope, were not very good, so we removed them, had them in an attic for many years, re-tested them, and finally sold the glass and the holders, for a pittance, to someone in Italy who wanted to try to re-figure them.

This was originally a ‘push-to’ telescope, meaning that one loosened up two Byers clutches (one for each axis), located the desired target in the sky, tightened the two clutches, did some fine tuning with an electric hand paddle to center the target more precisely, and then allowed the telescope drive to then keep the object in the center of the eyepiece or camera field of view as long as one wanted. It originally came with metal setting circles (basically, finely-made protractors that showed where the scope is pointing vis-a-vis the polar and declination axes), which made finding targets possible, though not trivial!

About 15 years ago, Bolster (with some help from me) installed Digital Setting Circles, which used a rotary encoder on each axis, along with a small hand-held computer and screen display, to allow one to select a given target; the DSC hand paddle’s display then would indicate how far one should rotate the scope along those axes to find the desired celestial object; when it was in the field of your widest eyepiece, one used the hand paddle to center it more precisely.

Converting this scope to an OnStep drive will, I hope, make this a Go-To scope in which one can command the telescope to aim at whatever target one desires.

Unfortunately, right now, the fastest it seems to rotate in Declination, with no load whatsoever (all scopes have been removed, so no balance or inertia problems) is about one degree per second. So doing a 180-degree turn in a North-South direction would take a full three minutes. A 30-degree turn would take 30 seconds. Can we make this a bit faster? I hope so.

I wasn’t able to really slew in right ascension (East-West) because the counterweight box, even though empty, seems to require too much torque to rotate right now.

Bolster passed away a few years ago, and this summer, the moment I had been dreading finally arrived: the drive on the Ealing died again, and his amazing skills and tenacity in fixing such problems was gone with him. What’s more, in his final years, his incurable, chronic idiopathic neuropathy made it literally impossible for him to speak, and even typing email responses to the rest of us took a very long time. So most of his wealth of knowledge and experience died with him.

As indicated in my earlier posts (here, here, here, and here), with help from others, I was able to take the two motor setups for the two axes out from the mount and get them working again on my workbench in their original format. I was even able to order and install material for the clutches. However, I discovered that one needed to adjust the clutches very, very precisely, or else they wouldn’t work at all.

I couldn’t figure out how to do that.

And nobody else who belongs to our observatory volunteered to help out, except for removing the scopes and drives from their former positions inside the mount.

So I decided to convert to a totally different type of telescope drive, one inspired by the Arduino boards and 3-D printers. A group of really smart and resourceful hobbyists (engineers?) designed a system around the Arduino environment that uses inexpensive off-the-shelf printed circuits and complex sub-boards and components, used originally mostly in the 3-D printers that have become so popular, to drive at telescope just the way astronomers want them to be driven.

Apparently, there have been many, many OnStep successes, but what we are doing may be the largest and most massive mount to date that has done such a conversion.

I was warned that the entire process would take some months. Those warnings were correct. But that’s OK. I’m retired, I have time, and I have access to tools and people who are interested in helping. What’s more, I have learned a whole lot about modern electronics, and my soldering skills are much better than they ever were.

I’d again like to thank Alan Tarica (who’s physically helped a **tremendous** amount), Prasad Agrahar (who first showed me the OnStep conversions he had done on a much smaller equatorial mount), Howard Dutton (who first conceived and implemented OnStep), Ken Hunter (who made and **donated** to us a complete, functional OnStep board together with all sorts of accessories and walked me by phone and video through many of my fumbling first steps), Khalid Bahayeldin, George Cushing, and many others.

Progress and Problems with an OnStep Conversion of a High-Quality 1970’s Telescope Drive

31 Friday Dec 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, Telescope Making, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arduino, Astrophotography, ATM, Hopewell Observatory, OnStep, Stepper Motors, Telescope

I have made a lot of progress over this winter break in converting the 50-year-old Ealing telescope mount at the Hopewell Observatory, as you can see in this video.

We are swapping out an electro-mechanical “dumb” drive that failed, in favor of a modern, solid-state one built in the Arduino environment. If it all works out as planned, this mount will be able to slew to any target and keep the target steady enough for astrophotograpy. I hope.

With a project like this, with delicate electronics that can easily get fried, I believe that having spare parts on hand is a good idea. The main board is pretty cheap: under $100, completely assembled, and the motors were about $30 each. We have spare stepper motors, spare stepper drivers, and a total of three main MaxESP OnStep boards.

Except that two of them (the ones we purchased from George C) don’t work at all, and I don’t know why. The one that Ken Hunter built and **donated** to us works just fine, after I did the required tweaking of various settings inside the Smart Hand Controller or SHC and inside a CONFIG.H file in the Arduino programming environment. And added the gears and belt.

I see almost no serious differences between George’s boards and Ken’s board. I am confident the problem is not my wiring or soldering, and it’s not the fact that George’s boards have RJ45 jacks, but what it is, I have no idea.

This is my second build of the connections between the stepper motor and the worm gear.

Without the help of Ken H, Howard Dutton, another Ken, Alan Tarica, Prasad Agrahar, and Khaled Bahayeldin, I never would have gotten this far. I am very appreciative of the amount of work that went into programming all of the many parts of the OnStep project as a whole. However, I found the OnStep Wiki rather confusing for beginners, and I hope to help them make it clearer in the future.

You can probably see that there is a good bit of wobble in the gears that involve the belts. That is probably because I failed to get the gears perfectly flush against the lathe chuck when I was enlarging their central holes from 5 mm to 1/4 inch despite using a dial indicator with a magnetic base to center it. I think I will need to order a new set of gears that have a 1/4″ axle hole already made at the factory. I don’t think I can do any better than I did, and that wasn’t good enough.

The reason for having the gears and belts is something to do with microstepping on the stepper motors that I really don’t understand. OnStep experts told me that the OnStep board, drivers, and steppers simply cannot handle gears that are 1 : 20 : 359. So we added a 3:1 toothed-gear-and-belt system so that the ratios are now 3 : 1 : 20 : 359. That set of ratios seems to make the steppers happy. (These motors have 200 steps per rotation, and are being currently driven at a rate of 1/16 of a step.) They don’t scream and stall any more, but the wobbly gears will probably translate into periodic error that one can see in the eyepiece or on long exposures with some kind of camera.

My next step is to take this entire apparatus up to the Hopewell Observatory itself and see what happens when I install them in the Right Ascension and Declination drives.

Then, we need to repair the electrical supply for the roll-off roof.

Then we have to put the telescopes back onto the mount.

Then, and only then, can we try having a “First Light” with the new motor pushing a very nice Ed Byers drive in an big, old, and very well-built university-grade telescope mount.

Actual Progress with OnStep

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Telescope Making

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ealing, Hopewell Observatory, Mount, OnStep, stepper motor, Telescope

I think I have succeeded in getting our OnStep build to work properly. Previously, whenever I asked the drive to slew to an new location, the stepper motors would build up to a certain speed and then stop rotating while they screamed, seemingly in protest. It’s called stalling.

With the help of several of the principal leaders in the OnStep project (Howard Dutton, Ken Hunter, Khalid Bahayeldin) and Alan Tarica and Prasad Agrahar, I think I may have finally got the settings set properly. The final secret was to reduce the slewing speed in the smart hand controller to the lowest setting.

This does make slewing rather slow, however. To go from the location of Jupiter to Capella tonight, which is a pretty long distance across the sky, took nearly eight minutes. Watch the video.

It’s Not Rust! It’s Just Grease!

19 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, Telescope Making, Uncategorized

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Tags

Byers, Ealiing, Hopewell Observatory, OnStep

Here is a photo of the inside of the declination axis of the Ealing mount at Hopewell Observatory.

The gears you see were made about 50 years ago by the Ed Byers company, who continue to produce some of the finest gears anywhere. The periodic error on this mount is very, very low, which is a Good Thing, and why we want to keep it and just upgrade the old drive. As you can see in a previous post, the old system had a finicky clutch drive that had caused a lot of problems, but worked very well indeed when it worked properly.

I am working to replace it with a more modern, reliable and user-friendly, namely an OnStep ‘build’.

The friendly and helpful folks at the OnStep project were asking for a picture showing how the existing Byers drive was put together. I hope these four photos help.

In the first photo, notice the greasy worm gear at the bottom left. It was removed from the mount, along with the old motors, and is sitting on my desk (with the old grease cleaned off), directly coupled to the stepper motor, which connects to one of the OnStep boards (in the wood-and-black aluminum box). In the second photo,

The black anodized bracket in the second photo holds the motor and the worm gear rigidly together. The bracket bolts into a place in the mount (not shown). It took a bit of work to get the stepper motor and the worm gear lined up within a couple of thousandths of an inch, but it’s done. Prasad turned me onto those cool little universal joints that permit one to connect items that don’t match perfectly.

20 turns of the worm gear, times 359 teeth on the big gear, means that it takes 7,180 turns of the stepper motor to make one full revolution of this declination axis or of the right ascension axis, which is identically mounted. (Not that you would want to go about spinning your telescope very far on either axis!)

So 19.97 turns of either motor make the scope travel 1 degree (7180 divided by 360).

And since our stepper motors make 200 steps in one revolution of the worm gear, it takes about 3994 motor steps to make the scope turn by that one degree (the last result, times 200).

Or if you are micro-stepping by, say, the rate of one sixteenth of a step, then by my calculations it will take 63,911 microsteps to turn by that degree (the last result, times 16). And that seems to be outside the range of permissible microsteps for these stepper motors, perhaps causing them to scream in protest. (I swear, that’s what it sounds like!)

From left to right: A spare OnStep board inside its wood-and-aluminum project box; the NEMA23 stepper motor on its bracket; a universal joint; a big bearing; the first worm gear (now cleaned off)

It appears that Khaled and Prasad might be correct: I might need to add a toothed gears and a belt to this arrangement to reduce that last number (63,911) by some factor. For very little money I just ordered a pair of such things, designed for 3-D printers and other computer-controlled machines. It will have 60 teeth on the motor and 20 teeth on the worm gear, and then the above would instead have only 21,304 microsteps to turn one degree. (No wonder they protest!) Once again I’ll have to disassemble the motor and drive bracket and do a bit of machining. A drill press and a punch will be fine.

The last two photos give some more detail on how the old drive system worked.

Close up of worm gear driving a toothed gear wheel that drives another worm gear that drives the right ascension axis
One of the original drive motor and clutch assemblies in place, inside the mount. All those gears have now been removed.

Mysterious Noises from Stepper Motors for the Ealing Telescope Mount

18 Saturday Dec 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Telescope Making

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alan Tarica, Ealing mount, George Cushing, Hopewell Observatory, Howard Dutton, Ken Hunter, Khalid Bahayeldin, OnStep, Prasad Agrahar, stepper motor, Telescope Making, Telescope Modification

A few blog entries ago, I thought I had made great progress in getting the old telescope drives for Hopewell Observatory’s venerable Ealing Mount to work again. Unfortunately, it became clear that one had to adjust the amount of friction in the clutches very, very accurately, and I saw no way to fine tune it.

So I bit the bullet and decided to convert the mount over to an inexpensive system, at least partly DIY, that uses very inexpensive solid-state printed circuit boards and Android phones to control stepper motors that make the telescope point in the directions desired. (Instead of spending many thousands on a Sidereal Technologies rebuild.)

This system is called OnStep and is spearheaded by a number of very generous volunteers: Howard Dutton, who basically invented the system and wrote all the original code, along with Ken Hunter, George Cushing, and Khaled Bahayeldin, and a number of others whose names I don’t recall. It uses off-the-shelf components, chips and sub-boards, that cost very, very little; these are put on one of a slew of different possible 3D-printed circuit boards. There is even a Wiki that could use a bit of editing. It’s got a ton of information but when I was starting out, I found it extremely confusing, and I am not alone. I promised to try to improve it when I get the Ealing telescope working properly.

After getting the software to work, then you arrange the connections to your telescope’s gears, power supply, and communications inside your own mount.

I am immeasurably aided in this conversion effort by Alan Tarica, who is the co-leader of the Washington, DC-area’s Telescope Making, Maintenance, and Modification Workshop (which has been going on for about 80 years) and by Prasad Agrahar, who made a remarkable telescope in our TMMMW several years ago and went on to build his own OnStep conversion of an existing commercial telescope. Prasad’s example showed me that if our old Ealing drive died, we should try OnStep.

Well, the Ealing drive did finally die. (It had presented problems ever since it was first delivered to the University of Maryland Observatory nearly 50 years ago.)

Michael Chesnes and Bill Rohrer of Hopewell helped materially with removing the old components of the scope and with then trying to debug the electrical problem that has now sprang up with our roll-off roof.

Ken Hunter made for us, and debugged, an entire OnStep board and refused to take any money for it. Prasad Agrahar gave us some NEMA17 stepper motors and some wires and likewise refused to let us pay. Prasad drove all the way from Philadelphia to help Alan and me figure this stuff out in person, both at the workshop and out at the observatory. Ken has spent hours, remotely from Yuma AZ, walking me through the various steps in managing the many settings that need to be uploaded and adjusted in order to get things to work. Ken told me he used to run the ATMFREE list-serve, but retired from that after an injury, and he remembered meeting me once at Stellafane. He also very kindly sent us an antenna for the system so that it can run WiFi or BlueTooth more efficiently from inside our massive metal mount.

Alan and I are fairly far along in the conversion, thanks to all this help. I had to learn some of the basics of the Arduino operating environment, which one uses to set all the many, many parameters needed to get the system running. And had to improve my soldering techniques! Fortunately, all the heavy lifting of getting all of the many lines of code working together has been done by Howard, Ken, and the others, so all I had to do was set things up to fit our particular set of choices for the board, the stepper driver, the sub-boards, the gears, and the motors.

Here is our current setup: we have two (now three) MaxESP boards running OnStep version 2.04 (iirc). (Multiple boards because they are cheap and in case one gets fried by a lightning strike or stupidity. It happens!)

They have TMC5160 stepper drivers, connected to two rather beefy NEMA23 stepper motors (200 steps per turn), which I arranged to fit exactly in-line with the worm gear that we will later put back into the mount. We have tweaked the ‘CONFIG.H’ file settings the best we could, and with an enormous amount of help, I think I’ve set the speeds of the stepper motors correctly. The worm gear turns another gear with 20 teeth, which turns another one with 359 teeth. (All made by Byers, and made very, very well.)

(We had NEMA17’s run by the TMC2130 stepper drivers, but we didn’t think they were beefy enough to rotate the very large mount we have, even if we balance it perfectly.)

It’s been a very interesting learning expedition. It’s taken quite a bit of time, but not really very much money. With mass production, the components (screws, capacitors, diodes, resistors, and so on) if purchased in medium quantities, are really very inexpensive.

However, the stepper motors are still not behaving properly. They scream instead of moving, as you can see in this video. I will post the current parameters on the OnStep wiki, where I said. You can see and hear the action in this little video. When I try to slew to any random, dummy target, the steppers will start rotating and also start making a deafening squeal that gets higher in pitch and volume. However, after a little while, both rotors stop turning either completely or almost completely. The smart hand controller pretends that the mount is moving in both axes, but it’s not true.

Right now, I don’t know what is causing this problem.

Anybody have suggestions?

Correct weight of the mystery glass

13 Wednesday Oct 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in Hopewell Observatorry, optical flat, Optics, Safety, Telescope Making

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

mystery glass

More progress with the 22-inch wide, 4-inch thick mystery glass.

It took four of us old farts- Jim Kaiser, Alan Tarica, Tom Crone, and me – to extract the mirror from its case (which was located under a very heavy Draper-style grinding and polishing machine) roll it onto a little stand we fabricated on a decent gym scale I borrowed from my gym ( http://www.True180.fitness ) and weigh it.

We were very careful when moving that heavy mirror. Nobody got hurt in any way. When putting the mirror back into its sturdy wood carrying box, we used ancient Egyptian technology of little rollers, and it worked like a charm.

The bathroom scale we had used earlier, up at Hopewell was very, very wrong. We found that the weight of the glass was really 212 pounds (about 96 kilograms, or 96,000 grams), not 130 pounds. Its volume was 20,722 cc, so its density is roughly 4.6. Will have to see what types of glass have roughly that density and an index of refraction of about 1.72 to 1.76.

I heard from one veteran telescope maker:

“I’ve been in the Tucson astronomy club for many decades and also in the optics industry there. Most all institutions that had connections to astronomy or optics in the 60s got portions of several semi loads of “glass bank glass”, glasses that at one point in the past were considered strategic materials for certain optical designs/systems. There was a wide variety of materials, but almost all was identified in some way. We’re there any markings ar data scribed in the glass? The largest I saw was about 15”, so yours might be a different source.

“A co-worker of mine has identified several mystery glasses from an accurate determination of density. Seems like you should be able to get better results w/a more accurate scale. Also many glass types made decades ago are obsolete – my friend has some older glass catalogs that might help you determine what it might be with more accurate numbers.”

So these were cast-offs from the Military Industrial Complex, basically: pieces of glass that the military decided it no longer needed for projects that had either been completed or abandoned, and that they didn’t feel like storing any more. So they gave them away to groups like National Capital Astronomers and Hopewell Observatory.

The only markings on the glass are the following: a heavily inscribed (by hand) apparent date of 2-8-56, which probably means either February 8 of 1956 or the 2nd of August 1956. Judging by the handwriting style of the numerals, it was probably Feb. 8 of 1956 (US style). Under that are the numerals 0225, which we have no idea about. In pencil, someone with US-style handwriting wrote what looks like “Low #” in cursive. Again, we have no idea what that means.

Thanks so much, Jim, Alan, and Tom!

Satisfying Fixes Made to 50-year-old Electro-mechanical Telescope Drive at Hopewell Observatory

29 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Optics, Telescope Making

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

declination, Ealing mount, gear-motor, Hopewell Observatory, OnStep, Optics, right ascension, stepper motor, Telescope

About a week week ago, the right ascension (or RA) drive on a vintage mount at the Hopewell Observatory stopped working. Instead of its usual hum, it began making scraping noises, and then ground to a halt. (This drive is the one that allows one to track the stars perfectly as the earth slowly rotates.)

Another member and I carefully removed the drive mechanism, and I took it home. At first, I thought it was the motor itself, but after examining it carefully, I noticed that some clutch pads inside the gearbox had come unglued, causing the clutch plates to be cockeyed. The motor itself worked just fine when disconnected from the gear box.

I recalled that the pads and the clutch had been very problematic, and that our resident but now-deceased electro-mechanical-optical wizard Bob Bolster had had to modify the gearbox quite a bit. I carefully disassembled the gearbox and used acetone to remove all the old glue that he had used to glue the pads on. After doing some research to find some equivalent pad material, I yesterday ordered some new gasket material with adhesive backing from McMaster-Carr. Lo and behold, I received it TODAY! Wow!

I cut out new pads, re-assembled everything, and the gears and worm drive work just fine. Not only that: there were no screws or nuts left over!

In addition, I now see how we can replace the extremely complicated partially-analog clutch-and-drive mechanism, in both RA and in Declination with a much simpler stepper-motor system using something called OnStep.

Here is a photo of the some of the innards of the scope:

A bit complicated, no?

In the next photo, my pencil is pointing to the clutch pads inside the gear box that had come loose, causing the clutch plates to become cockeyed, jamming the gears. The clutch is so that the observer can ever-so-slightly tweak the telescope forward or backwards in RA, in order to center the target. There is another gearbox for the declination, but it’s still working OK, so we left it alone.

The synchronous gear-motor in the background. My pencil is pointing to the problem.

Of course, we still have to re-install the gearbox back in the scope.

Bob Bolster, mentioned above, was one of the founding members of the Hopewell Observatory. He was an absolute wizard at fixing things and keeping this telescope mount going, but he is no longer alive. I was afraid that I would not be able to fix this problem, but it looks like I’ve been successful.

I append an image of a very beautifully-refurbished Ealing telescope and mount – similar to the one owned by Hopewell – that belongs to the Austin Astronomical Society. Ours is so much more beat up than this one that it’s embarrassing! Plus, both we and the University of Maryland were unable to get the telescope itself, which is a Ritchey-Chretien design, ever to work properly. So we sold the mirror and cell to a collector in Italy for a pittance, and installed four other, smaller scopes on the mount instead.

Disturbing Racist Clauses Found in Early NCA Constitutions & Bylaws

29 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, History, science, Telescope Making

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Albert Einstein, amateur, astronomy, Black people, by-laws, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Caucasian, CIW, constitution, DC, ERO, Eugenics, Eugenics Records Office, Fairfax, George Carruthers, High Schools, History, Hitler, Montgomery County, National Capital Astronomer, Nazis, NCA, Prince George's County, Racism, science, Segregation, Star Dust, Washington

By Guy Brandenburg

Recently, while preparing to give a talk at this year’s Stellafane telescope-makers’ convention, I was disappointed to discover that the National Capital Astronomers (NCA), which I’ve belonged to for about 30 years, specifically excluded Black members for nearly 3 decades: from about 1940 all the way up to1969.

But NCA didn’t start out being overtly racist. Our original 1937 founding document has no such language. It reads, in part,

“The particular business and objects of [the NCA] shall be the education and mutual improvement of its members in the science of Astronomy and the encouragement of an interest in this science among others. (…) The activities of this Association are designed for the enjoyment and cultural profit of all interested in astronomy, whether the member be a beginner, an advanced student, or one whose pursuit of the science is necessarily desultory.”

And today’s NCA home page reads, “All are welcome to join. Everyone who looks up to the sky with wonder is an astronomer and welcomed by NCA. You do not have to own a telescope, but if you do own one that is fine, too. You do not have to be deeply knowledgeable in astronomy, but if you are knowledgeable in astronomy that is fine, too. You do not have to have a degree, but if you do that is fine, too. WE ARE THE MOST DIVERSE local ASTRONOMY CLUB anywhere. Come to our meetings and you will find this out. WE REALLY MEAN THIS!”

But in the 1940’s, the original open-minded and scientific NCA membership policy changed. The January 1946 Star Dust listed a number of changes to be voted on by the membership in the club’s founding documents. (See https://capitalastronomers.org/SD_year/1946/StarDust_1946_01.pdf ) The organization voted to change article III of its constitution as follows:

From:

“only Caucasians over 16 years old are eligible for membership.”

To this:

“to include all ages (see by-laws), exclude only the Black race.”

While it may be shocking that a scientific organization like NCA had such a policy, people often forget how racist a nation the USA used to be, and for how long. If you look up actual pages of DC area newspapers from the 1950s, you will note that the classified advertisements were largely segregated both by race and by gender – want ads would very often specify male or female, single or married, White-only or Colored-only jobs, apartments, and so on.

Schools in DC, MD, and Virginia were mostly segregated, either by law or in practice, up until the late 1960s or early 1970s. The 1954 Brown v Board decision had very little real impact in most areas until much, much later. Queens (NYC), PG County (MD) and Boston (MA) had violent movements against integrating schools in the 1970s. I know because I attended demonstrations against those racists and have some scars to prove it.

While the Federal and DC governments offices were integrated immediately after the Civil War, that changed for the worse when Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912.

Many scientists in the USA and in Europe believed the pseudo-scientific ideas of racial superiority and eugenics that arose around 1900 and were still widespread 50 years ago – and even today, as recent events have sadly shown.

In The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black explains how august scientific institutions like the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), the American Natural History Museum in New York, and a number of eminent statisticians and biologists for many decades supported the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor. So did the fabulously wealthy Rockefeller and Harriman Foundations.

The ERO pushed the concept of the genetic superiority of the ‘Nordic’ race and helped to pass State laws sterilizing the ‘weak’ and forbidding interracial marriage. They were also successful in passing the 1924 Federal immigration law that severely cut back immigration from parts of the world where supposedly ‘inferior’ people lived – e.g. Eastern and Southern Europe. As a result, many Jews who would have loved to escape Hitler’s ovens by crossing the Atlantic never made it.  

Hitler and his acolytes always acknowledged their ideological and procedural debt to American eugenical laws, literature, and propaganda. As we all know, Germany’s Nazis put those ideas to work murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others.

It took more than three decades for the CIW to withdraw their support of the ERO. A CIW committee concluded in 1935 “that the Eugenics Record Office was a worthless endeavor from top to bottom, yielding no real data, and that eugenics itself was not a science but rather a social propaganda campaign with no discernable value to the science of either genetics or human heredity.” (Black, p. 390) The members pointedly compared the work of the ERO to the excesses of Nazi Germany. However, it took four more years for CIW to cut all their ties – shortly after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, starting World War Two.

I don’t know exactly when the ‘Caucasian’-only policy became part of the NCA rules, but it seems to have been between the club founding in 1937, and October 1943 when volume 1, number 1 of Star Dust was printed. At one point, perhaps around 1940, NCA decided that only ‘Caucasians’ over 16 could join. But as indicated above, in 1946, the racial exclusion policy was narrowed to only exclude Black people. Apparently Jews, Italians, young people, Latin Americans, and Asians were eligible to join NCA from 1946 to 1969. But not African-Americans.

While researching my talk, I found that the NCA held amateur telescope-making classes at a number of all-white DC, MD, and VA high schools, from the 1940s through about 1970, both during the days of de jure segregation and the merely de-facto type: McKinley, Roosevelt, Central, Bladensburg, Falls Church, and McLean high schools are listed. While Star Dust mentions a telescope-making course at (the largely-Black) Howard University in 1946, there is no mention of any assistance for that course from NCA.

I also found no evidence in any issue of Star Dust from that era that anybody at the time raised any vocal objections to racial exclusion. Not in 1946, nor 23 years later when the rule prohibiting Black members was quietly dropped (in 1969) when a new constitution was adopted.

A few current or past NCA members confirmed to me that at some point, they noticed that racist language and privately wondered about it. One person told me that they definitely recalled some now-deceased NCA members who were openly racist and not shy about expressing those views. Others told me that they had never heard any discussion of the subject at all.

 (As one who grew up in DC and Montgomery County, and attended essentially-segregated public schools there, I am sorry that neither I nor my family actively spoke up at the time, even though a farm adjacent to ours in Clarksburg was owned by a Black family [with no school-age children at the time]. Amazing how blind one can be! The racists of those days were not shy about committing violence to achieve their ends. Fear might be one reason for silence.)

One possibility is that some of the early NCA meetings might have been held at private residences; perhaps some of the racist members insisted in preventing non-‘Caucasian’ or ‘Black’ people from attending. It is too bad the other NCA members didn’t take the other route and stay true to the original ideas of the club, and tell the racist members to get lost.

Very ironic: the late George Carruthers, a celebrated Naval Research Labs and NASA scientist, and an instrument-maker for numerous astronomical probes and satellites, gave a talk to the NCA in September of 1970 – not too long after the NCA apparently dropped its racist membership rules (April, 1969). So, a mere year and a half before he gave his talk, he could not have legally joined the organization. Nor could he have done so when he was making his own telescopes from scratch as a teenager in the 1940s. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Robert_Carruthers on the life and work of this great African-American scientist and inventor.

To NCA’s credit, we have done better in the past few decades at encouraging participation in telescope viewing parties, telescope making, and lectures by members of all races and ethnic groups. However, I often find that not very many NCA members bring telescopes to viewing events, or show up to judge science fairs, in mostly-minority neighborhoods. Often, it’s just me. That needs to change. We need to encourage an interest in science, astronomy, and the universe in children and the public no matter their skin color or national origin, and we need to combat the racist twaddle that passes for eugenics.

I anticipate that NCA will have a formal vote repudiating the club’s former unscientific and racist policies and behavior. I hope we will redouble our efforts to promote the study of astronomy to members of all ethnic groups, especially those historically under-represented in science.

We could do well to note the words that Albert Einstein wrote in 1946, after he had been living in the US for a decade, and the same year that NCA confirmed that Black people could not join:

“a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the “Whites” toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes.

The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

Many a sincere person will answer: “Our attitude towards Negroes is the result of unfavorable experiences which we have had by living side by side with Negroes in this country. They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability.”

I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences. And yet Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, declared slaves inferior beings who were justly subdued and deprived of their liberty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a traditional prejudice from which, despite his extraordinary intellect, he could not free himself.

What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.

I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.”

Source: http://www.kganu.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/alberteinsteinonthenegroquestion-1946.pdf

I am indebted to Morgan Aronson, Nancy Byrd, Richard Byrd, Geoff Chester, Jeff Guerber, Jay Miller, Jeffrey Norman, Rachel Poe, Todd Supple, Wayne Warren, Elizabeth Warner, and Harold Williams for documents, memories, and/or technical support.

First Telescope Making Class Since March of 2020!

15 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Optics, Telescope Making

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Tags

aluminizing, Coulter, Mirror, parabolization, Silvering, spherical, Telescope

Tonight we were finally able to hold a telescope making workshop again, for the first time since March 13, 2020, according to our log-in sheet.

We had five people, and we looked at several mirrors.

The first one was a plate glass, 10″, f/5.5 Coulter mirror that Kevin Hartnett had obtained and wanted me to strip the old aluminum coating from and then silver it and overcoat it. I thought the coating looked rather good, especially given its age, and wanted to put it on the testing stand to see how the figure looked. All of us thought the geometric figure of the mirror looked pretty good, and the ronchi lines looked nice and smooth. Alin Tolea said he saw a narrow turned down edge region perhaps 1/4″. Kevin thought it performed well, and I can see why.

I hope my silvering job turns out at least as good as its current aluminization.

Here are a few frames from my video of the Ronchi images (100 lines per inch):

The second one was a 17.5″ f/4.5 pyrex mirror, also originally made by Coulter and then refigured by somebody called Optical Western Labs (?) in California. The owner, We did not like this mirror at all. We thought the Ronchi lines were not smooth; there is a raised area in the center; and it even shows some signs of astigmatism. Here are a couple of frames the video I took of its Ronchi measurements:

The third mirror was an 8″, under-f/4 plate glass mirror that the owner reported performed very poorly. Once we put it on the stand, we saw why: it had never been parabolized! The Ronchi lines were almost perfectly straight! You only want straight Ronchi lines if your goal is to have a spherical (as opposed to parabolic, ellipsoidal, or hyperbolic) mirror. That’s why all its images were blurry. Nagesh Kanvindeh immediately decided to start trying to parabolize it, and we happened to have a synthetic pitch lap of 8″ diameter that had been last used to finish an f/4 mirror, so he got started right away.

By the way, our new hours are 5:00 pm to 8:30 pm, Tuesdays and Fridays.

A piece of mystery glass

29 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, Hopewell Observatorry, Math, Optics, Telescope Making

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

ATM, barium, Bausch & Lomb, Bureau of Standards, flint, glass, Hopewell Observatory, Math, mystery glass, Optics, Schott, Snell's Law, Telescope

Many years ago, the late Bob Bolster, a founding member of Hopewell Observatory and an amazing amateur telescope maker, got hold of a large piece of glass, perhaps World War Two military surplus left over from the old Bureau of Standards.

I have no idea what it is made out of. If Bob had any clue about its composition, he didn’t tell anyone.

Its diameter is 22 inches, and its thickness is about 3.25″. It has a yellowish tint, and it is very, very heavy.

If you didn’t know, telescope lenses (just like binocular or camera lenses) are made from a wide variety of ingredients, carefully selected to refract the various colors of light just so. Almost all glass contains quartz (SiO2), but they can also contain limestone (CaCO3), Boric oxide (B2O3), phosphates, fluorides, lead oxide, and even rare earth elements like lanthanum or thorium. This link will tell you more than you need to know.

If you are making lenses for a large refracting telescope, you need to have two very different types of glass, and you need to know their indices of refraction very precisely, so that you can calculate the the exact curvatures needed so that the color distortions produced by one lens will be mostly canceled out by the other piece(s) of glass. This is not simple! The largest working refractor today is the Yerkes, with a diameter of 40 inches (~1 meter). By comparison, the largest reflecting telescope made with a single piece of glass today is the Subaru on Mauna Kea, with a diameter of 8.2 meters (323 inches).

For a reflecting telescope, one generally doesn’t care very much what the exact composition of the glass might be, as long as it doesn’t expand and contract too much when the temperature rises or falls.

We weren’t quite sure what to do with this heavy disk, but we figured that before either grinding it into a mirror or selling it, we should try to figure out what type of glass it might be.

Several companies that produce optical glass publish catalogs that list all sorts of data, including density and indices of refraction and dispersion.

Some of us Hopewell members used a bathroom scale and tape measures to measure the density. We found that it weighed about 130 pounds. The diameter is 22 inches (55.9 cm) and the thickness is 3 and a quarter inches (8.26 cm). Using the formula for a cylinder, namely V = pi*r2*h, the volume is about 1235 cubic inches or 20,722 cubic centimeters. Using a bathroom scale, we got its weight to be about 130 lbs, or 59 kg (both +/- 1 or 2). It is possible that the scale got confused, since it expects two feet to be placed on it, rather than one large disk of glass.

However, if our measurements are correct, its density is about 2.91 grams per cc, or 1.68 ounces per cubic inches. (We figured that the density might be as low as 2.80 or as high as 3.00 if the scale was a bit off.)

It turns out that there are lots of different types of glass in that range.

Looking through the Schott catalog I saw the following types of glass with densities in that range, but I may have missed a few.

2.86  N-SF5

2.86 M-BAK2

2.89 N-BAF4

2.90 N-SF8

2.90 P-SF8

2.91 N-PSK3

2.92 N-SF15

2.93 P-SF69

2.94 LLF1

2.97 P-SK58A

3.00 N-KZFS5

3.01 P-SK57Q1

By comparison, some of the commonest and cheapest optical glasses are BAK-4 with density 3.05 and BK-7 with density 2.5.

Someone suggested that the glass might contain radioactive thorium. I don’t have a working Geiger counter, but used an iPhone app called GammaPix and it reported no gamma-ray radioactivity at all, and I also found that none of the glasses listed above (as manufactured today by Schott) contain any Uranium, Thorium or Lanthanum (which is used to replace thorium).

So I then rigged up a fixed laser pointer to measure its index of refraction using Snell’s Law, which says

Here is a schematic of my setup:


The fixed angle a I found to be between 50 and 51 degrees by putting my rig on a large mirror and measuring the angle of reflection with a carpentry tool.

And here is what it looked like in practice:

I slid the jig back and forth until I could make it so that the refracted laser beam just barely hit the bottom edge of the glass blank.

I marked where the laser is impinging upon the glass, and I measured the distance d from that spot to the top edge of the glass.

I divided d by the thickness of the glass, in the same units, and found the arc-tangent of that ratio; that is the measure, b, of the angle of refraction.

One generally uses 1.00 for the index of refraction of air (n1). I am calling n2 the index of refraction of the glass. I had never actually done this experiment before; I had only read about doing it.

As you might expect, with such a crude setup, I got a range of answers for the thickness of the glass, and for the distance d. Even angle a was uncertain: somewhere around 49 or 50 degrees. For the angle of refraction, I got answers somewhere between 25.7 and 26.5 degrees.

All of this gave me an index of refraction for this class as being between 1.723 and 1.760.

This gave me a list of quite a few different glasses in several catalogs (two from Schott and one from Bausch & Lomb).

Unfortunately, there is no glass with a density between 2.80 and 3.00 g/cc that has an index of refraction in that range.

None.

So, either we have a disk of unobtanium, or else we did some measurements incorrectly.

I’m guessing it’s not unobtanium.

I’m also guessing the error is probably in our weighing procedure. The bathroom scale we used is not very accurate and probably got confused because the glass doesn’t have two feet.

A suggestion was made that this might be what Bausch and Lomb called Barium Flint, but that has an index of refraction that’s too low, only 1.605.

Mystery is still unsolved.

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