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Comment by JshWright | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact, this facility is underneath the football stadium at Arizona University.

Tom Scott recently posted a guest video from the Active Galactic Videos YouTube channel about this process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP9HNVuGb-g

And if you're ever in Tuscon you can visit the facility, they do tours: https://mirrorlab.arizona.edu/tours (Also recommend visiting Kitt Peak and doing one of their night observing programs.)

Ditto that. I haven't done the Mirror Lab tour yet, but have heard great things. Kitt Peak is worth visiting for the night observing programs (they have a couple, see https://www.noao.edu/kpvc/Prog/) as well as just to go up during the day and take in the view.

The Kitt Peak program I did was a great experience. It's in the middle of a desert wilderness, so get there early for incredible views and a sunset. We got a tour of many of the telescopes. Bring lots of warm clothes because it is quite cold and windy after the sun goes down. And then at the end, for one more bit of excitement, you drive down the (steep, winding) mountain road without headlights--just following the brake lights of the person in front of you.

UofA also has a telescope facility on Mount Lemmon with night observations open to the public. The program is equally good.

That's really interesting. Back in my college days, the lab next to me would run experiments that would routinely pickup vibrations from the road nearby. Even when stabilized on an actively controlled optical table. Which isn't that big of a deal, their experiments would run for a few hours. So they would run it in the middle of the night.

The telescope lab is directly under a stadium, their process for a single mirror is several months/years long. I wonder how they manage their process. Do they just pause and continue once the people leave? I also wonder how damaging the starts and stops (if they do it) are to the final quality of the product.

According to youtube tutorials on telescope mirror polishing, a certain amount of randomness in the system is actually quite beneficial. No idea about the final stages, however.

University of Arizona, U of A or just UA

I don't think there is a place called "Arizona University." JshWright means University of Arizona.

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