Collaborate Disseminate
Helium-neon lasers may be little more than glorified neon signs, but there’s just something about that glowing glass tube that makes the whole process of stimulated emission easier to understand. …read more Continue reading Lasers Al Fresco: Fun with Open-Cavity Lasers
Lasers are pretty much magic — it’s all done with mirrors. Not every laser, of course, but in the 1980s, the most common lasers in commercial applications were probably the …read more Continue reading More Mirrors (and a Little Audio) Mean More Laser Power
We once thought that the best houses on Halloween were the ones that gave out full-size candy bars. While that’s still true, these days we’d rather see a cool display …read more Continue reading Bone-Shaking Haunted Mirror Uses Stable Diffusion
We knew the mirrors in our house were not really very good mirrors, optically speaking. Your mirror eats up 20 to 40 percent of the light that hits it. High-quality …read more Continue reading Dielectric Mirror Shines Bright
[Hank Green] posted an interesting video about the first liquid mirror telescope from back in the 1850s. At the time, scientists were not impressed. But, these days, people are revisiting …read more Continue reading Toxic Telescope Makes You Mad as a Hatter
One of the Star Trek movies has a McGuffin called “transparent aluminum.” While magic mirrors aren’t really transparent, it appears that way to a casual observer. If you haven’t seen …read more Continue reading Magic Mirror Isn’t Transparent Metal
The term “adaptive optics” sounds like something that should be really complicated and really expensive. And in general, the ability to control the properties of optical elements is sufficiently difficult …read more Continue reading A Tiny Forest of Resistors Makes for Quick and Dirty Adaptive Optics
“Don’t worry, that’ll buff right out.” Alarming news this week as the James Webb Space Telescope team announced that a meteoroid had hit the space observatory’s massive primary mirror. While …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: June 12, 2022
[IMSAI Guy] presents for your viewing pleasure, a nice video on the topic of optical filters and mirrors. (Video, embedded below) The first optical device is a simple absorption filter, …read more Continue reading All About Dichroic Optical Filters
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has become something of a celebrity here on Earth, and rightfully so. After decades of development, the $10 billion deep space observatory promises to …read more Continue reading Put a Little Piece of the James Webb on your Wall