“I have a mental toolkit of instruments, tools and techniques, taken from working on professional telescopes, which I bring to the workbench when I’m Blueprinting a telescope here at Axis Squared.”
Mike has done every part of building and maintaining an observatory, even the stuff that people don’t think about:
Jackhammered the foundation to expose bedrock under a dome…
Designed a pier for a 2000 pound telescope, then actually welded the rebar subframe together and poured the concrete for it…
Built walls, doors, windows, electrical wiring, conduit runs, and mounted the dome…
Polar aligned a professional telescope, taking 3 nights of slow and careful measurements to get thing perfect…
Dug ditches for power and network cabling…
Soldered RS-232 connectors, checked opto-couplers, adjusted the worm backlash (that worm wheel was 48 inches across…), set the axial preload for balance, corrected wiring issues in a custom CCD, collimated a telescope twice the size of a car, wrote software to help automate dome control, washed one of the 33 foot diameter mirrors on the Large Binocular Telescope…
OK, a chance to catch our breath…
Stripped cleaned and coated at least a dozen mirrors up to 61 inches in diameter
re-greased the drive gear assembly for a 90 inch telescope
shoveled snow off of domes
machined an adapter for a custom filter wheel
mounted and tested cameras/spectroscopes/specialty instruments on various research telescopes
ran observatories overnight for astronomers visiting doing research…
Among all of this, he still found time to...
repaint the entrance sign for the Mt Lemmon Observatory site
help with asbestos abatement in a 40 year old Air Force dormitory
drive a front-end loaded to clear snow from the main drive of the observatory
present research in front of an audience at a major astronomical conference
get published for his contributions to Gamma Ray discoveries