John Hayes:
Dave Erickson:
John Hayes:
Dave,
You and I are kindred spirits in this regard and I'm in it for pretty much exactly the same reasons.  But then we were both once interferometer guys as well.

John

Hi John great to hear from you! We certainly are kindred spirits!

Moved to a new house closer to the grand-kids a while back, just starting to bring my Zygo back up.. Once I am back from the eclipse I plan to start on a 10" schmidt camera with  a OSC at prime focus, should be fun...

It’s funny that I have a Zygo as well!  It’s an old GPI that I think runs under XP on a computer so old that I’m not sure that it will even boot any longer.  As you may know, I was the designer of the WYKO 6000, which was the instrument that kicked off that epic legal battle between our two companies back in the 90’s.  The teaching lab at the Wyant college still has one that I’ve been maintaining for over a decade and they let me use whenever I want to test something.  I’d love to be able to use my Zygo system but I don’t have the energy (or the room) to build an isolation table for it.  What do you do for a table?  The Schmidt project sounds like fun!

John

I recall you mentioning your Zygo. There are a couple of shops in SoCal with WYKO 6000, I get calls on occasion to fix them... still a good instrument....

I have a Zygo MK11 on an 11'  Gaertner optical bench with a parascope to bring the centerline up to 12". Its not a phase measuring instrument. I changed to camera for a new CMOS camera, and I use the coupling tricks to reduce vibration and eyeball the fringes. Not analytical but works.
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