Over the weekend I received several books on the history of telescopes from a number of sources, including my ”favourite” source -- the Royal Society. The books included Charles King’s excellent “History of the Telescope” from 1955 ($75). If anyone is interested in a copy, there was a second copy available, although it may well be gone by now. This small collection will form the basis for my current project, creating a list of the observatories of the world -- with two goals. First, to find how many have primary mirrors that are over about 30" in diameter and are constructed before 1970-1980 (and therefore are likely to suffer from binodal astigmatism). The second goal is to determine if the database contains enough information to create an optical model of at least the main telescope. Three of the books have lists of observatories that seem significant. The list will be posted here when I get to it (holding your breath is not recommended).
On a slightly more informative topic at the moment; this morning's e-mail brought a message from ORA employee Mark Kahan, who mentioned he was having trouble sleeping and found his way to a website on the history of astrophysics. There he found a recently posted discussion of a painting from 1607 by Jan Brueghel that appears to show a Keplerian telescope some 5 years before it is reported in the literature by Kepler. This is going to make going to the museum so much more interesting. It didn’t occur to me to look for optics in the paintings. The link, which is a quick read and shows the painting could be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2696v1 and I highly recommend reading it.
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