This is Tom, an engineer, who has been a professional solar astronomer. He is a member of our club, and gave a terrific talk tonight on how our Sun works. It was an amazing and wonderful talk, with great scientific details and some recent photographs. This is one of the highest resolution images of one sunspot ever captured. It is a stunning image, showing incredibly fine detail. It was taken at Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. Tom didn't produce this image, but he worked on the design of the new telescope at Big Bear some years ago.
Ken- The primary for that telescope was done at the Mirror Lab! It is a 1.6 meter off-axis section of an asphere, done as a proof-of-concept for the 8.4 meter GMT mirrors. I didn't work much on it personally, but was done by our staff. Good to know it is working well! -Dean
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