From: "Bob May" 
To: "atmlist" 
Reply-To: "Bob May" 


Actually, the mirrors made in the Dobson tradition are more like the
Coulter mirrors of old.  You sometimes get a good one and sometimes you get
a bad one.  The method that John uses can indeed produce a good mirror but
often fails but that really doesn't mean much because his instruments
really aren't for getting the maximum amount of light into an Airy disk but
to get some magnification so that the fainter things can be seen in the
sky.  So what if the stars are a bit larger than they really should be, the
average person won't be able to tell the difference in the first place and
the uneducated public thinks that is the way that they should be.  They
don't care about getting the last half magnitude in a star and the idea of
a cluster being a bunch of sharp pinpoints is foreign to them.  Just seeing
the outer stars as points is amazing for the average viewer. In other
words, if you want a light bucket, the Dobson method of grinding and
polishing is just fine!
Bob May
http://nav.to/bobmay
bobmay{at}nethere.com
NEW! http://bobmay.astronomy.net

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