User:JonesMI

Welcome to my user page.

Astronomy and optics

Apochromatic lens brings 3 wavelengths to a common focal plane. (Note that this lens is designed for astronomy, so one of the 3 wavelengths is outside the visible spectrum.)

I got started in astronomy at about age 7, and optics in particular at age 19 when I ground my first telescope mirror (a 6" f/6 Newtonian) and taught myself Conrady raytracing on an old Friedan mechanical calculator and trig/log tables. I did two degrees in optics and electrical engineering, worked in optical fabrication in California in 1976 between degrees, and became a gainfully employed optical designer and engineer in 1979. One of my longtime hobbies has been to key in every lens design I could find and try to optimize it a little further. This means all the lenses in Cox's book "A System of Optical Design", all the 9000+ lenses in LensView, all of them in Warren Smith and Milt Laikin's books, and all I could find in JOSA and Applied Optics. Consequently, I have designed some 12000-odd lenses in the past 33+ years, and have had a total of about 200 designs built and fielded.

I'm also an active amateur astronomer and telescope maker. I taught two classes in telescope mirror grinding, and have made (I think) about 45 mirrors to date, mostly for other people. I also made a 6" f/10 refractor, using BK7 and F4, which gives the usual conventional secondary spectrum, but still very sharp imagery. I'm almost finished with a nice home optics shop, including a Newtonian interferometer using a low-pressure sodium light, and a 24" Strasbaugh polisher I bought at an auction, marked as a pottery wheel! I have optics diamond generated for two 10" f/26 Maksutovs, a 5" f/23 Mak, and a 4" f/15 Mak, and I have glass to make an 8" apochromatic objective. I also have a Gene Cross 24" tapered mirror blank, and have designed an f/9 Modified Dall-Kirkham system for it. I'm currently using a 16" f/6 Newtonian and 5" f/15 Tinsley Maksutov for most of my observing.

Wikipedia

I only recently stumbled across Wikipedia in the spring of 2006 while doing a Google search, started reading some of the articles, saw some errors here and there, and have started dabbling at either improving existing articles or generating new ones altogether. Contributions to date have been raytracing, optical lens design, encircled energy, piston, tilt, defocus, astigmatism, and several in the telescope section, including Non-achromatic, apochromat, superachromat, Newtonian, Pfund telescope, Argunov, and Modified Dall-Kirkham articles. I also showed the derivation for the peak intensity formula for a Gaussian beam.

I'll add more to this later as time permits. Please be patient with me as I learn the Wiki way, with all the formatting, etc. Glad to have the chance to add to Wiki and help make it even a tinier bit better. What a wonderful project.

Mike