Making An Eye For The Sky
Dan Bakken of Mead is fascinated with extremes, from the molecules on the surface of glass to the trillions of miles between Earth and the stars.
His latest project - building what will be one of the largest portable telescopes ever constructed by an amateur - allows him to indulge those fascinations in his own garage.
For the past year, Bakken, 30, has spent most of his free time and expendable income on a telescope he calls “Hercules.”
He takes hours each day to rub felt pads over a 185-pound lens that will be the main component of the huge scope.
Polishing - “smearing molecules,” as Bakken calls it - is necessary so the the lens will catch light reflected off stars and beam it into a small mirror that will then transfer it into the eye-piece of the telescope.
The big lens, which is 2 inches thick and cost $3,500, is 41 inches in diameter.
That’s about an inch larger than the current biggest portable scope, said Bakken, who works at Johnson Matthey Electronics growing crystals used in infra-red detectors.
When completed, the entire telescope will be about 15 feet high and 4 feet wide and allow Bakken to see stars and nebulae hundreds of light-years away.
“This won’t allow me to see anything I haven’t already seen,” said Bakken, who has built or helped build more than a dozen other telescopes. “This will just show me more detail than I’ve ever seen before.”
There’s still a lot of work to be done before the big scope will be ready for star-gazing, though.
The lens must be ground down and polished until the surface is precisely right.
“It’s got to hold its shape, literally, to one-millionth of an inch,” Bakken said.
Achieving that degree of accuracy takes complicated procedures and technical equipment, which Bakken was happy to try to explain to a couple of astronomical ignoramuses who stopped by his home one day this week.
“I don’t know how detailed to get, here,” said the president of the Spokane Astronomical Society, brandishing some charts he uses to track the scope’s parameters. “It’ll take a few minutes.”
Uh-huh.
Suffice it to say that it takes a lot of time, patience and understanding of optics, physics and calculus to calibrate the lens.
When he’s finished polishing, the lens will go to a company in Los Angeles where it will be coated with aluminum only “molecules thick.”
The procedure will transform the lens into the mirror necessary to catch starlight.
Bakken plans to drive the glass to Los Angeles himself for the aluminum treatment.
“UPS won’t take anything this big,” he said with a laugh.
Besides, he said, he doesn’t trust delivery drivers to take care of his baby.
After spending hours calibrating the precise measurements necessary to make “Hercules” work, Bakken said he doesn’t want to take any chances with someone who may not love his telescope as much as he does.
When the $3,500 hunk of glass arrived from Texas last year, the package had footprints on it and was standing in a corner of the truck when it should have been laid flat.
“I can’t have that happen now.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo