Steward Mirror Lab Feb 2016

Al and Carol, friends from Illinois are visiting for a week.  Al is a photography buff, so we attended the Steward mirror lab tour in Tuscon.  The lab makes mirrors for the largest telescopes on the planet.
From their web site:
The Mirror Lab team has also 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, the lab's founder and scientific director. Curious about the suitability of borosilicate glass (the kind used in glass ovenware) for making honeycomb structures, he tested the idea by fusing together two custard cups in an improvised kiln. The experiment was a success and led to a series of bigger kilns and small furnaces and, eventually, the spin casting of three 1.8 meter mirrors.
The Mirror Lab continues its impressive history of successful, ground breaking mirror castings with the Giant Magellan Telescope.  This telescope will be the largest and most advanced earth-based telescope in the world when complete.  Currently, three of the seven, 8.4 meter segmented mirrors have been cast.  The first mirror is complete and the other two are in various stages of production.  On September 18, 2015 the fourth center-primary mirror was cast at the mirror lab.


This display case shows the chucks of glass that are melted in the honeycomb mold.




The oven that melts the glass is huge - no picture this time.  They were at the polishing phase. 

This mirror is ready to be lifted and moved to the polishing station.  It is huge and very heavy.  Note the many suction cups that will lift it.

This crane will lift the mirror to a vertical position.

This is the fourth mirror, just beginning the polishing process.

LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope)

Particular scientific goals of the LSST include:

• Measuring weak gravitational lensing in the deep sky to detect signatures of dark energy and dark matter.
• Mapping small objects in the Solar System, particularly near-Earth asteroids and Kuiper belt objects.
• Detecting transient optical events such as novae and supernovae.
• Mapping the Milky Way.

Allowing for maintenance, bad weather and other contingencies, the camera is expected to take over 200,000 pictures (1.28 petabytes uncompressed) per year, far more than can be reviewed by humans. Managing and effectively data mining the enormous output of the telescope is expected to be the most technically difficult part of the project.^[21][22]Initial computer requirements are estimated at 100 teraflops of computing power and 15 petabytes of storage, rising as the project collects data.^[23]

It is also hoped that the vast volume of data produced will lead to additional serendipitous discoveries.  Our tour guide explained that eventually, amateur star gazers can use this to study and data mine specific regions of the sky.  It will work sort of like google mapping for navigation works now.  So it may be possible for regular folks to discover something new in the cosmos!!  Not till 2020 though...........Stay tuned.