Video: World’s most awesome grad students (@Robin_Wing and Emily) get our 2.6 m telescope operational at Echo Base
28 Apr 2011We took a major step towards becoming an operational lidar again with Robin and Emily succesfully "closing" the surface of our 2.6 m diameter liquid mirror telescope (see video). One of the many pluses of a liquid mirror is when you move you put the liquid in a bottle and the container on a truck and away you go. But setting up is more difficult, as the mirror must be extremely level or the mirror surface "breaks" and the you have a puddle in the middle instead of a mirror. Since we moved to our new observatory the telescope container had to be completely re-balanced which is a tedious and exacting procedure that PCL "vets" like Steve and I know all too well. Now Robin and Emily are in the club! They have worked hard on this for several weeks and we are very proud of them! For more on our liquid mirror/project see our web page http://pcl.physics.uwo.ca.
