Our Founder
Paul McNabb founded the mirror lab in 1997 in order to create the best amateur telecopes possible.
Inch for inch our mirrors surpass store bought or commercial grade scopes.
Where the 19th Century Art of Mirror Making Meets the 21st Century
The Saint Petersburg Mirror Lab is a small band of dedicated mirror grinders and telescope makers living in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. We offer a mirror making class for interested persons. We strive to create the best mirrors our home brew technology can muster. This includes robotic foucault testing and laser interferometry.
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Mike P's eyepiece case 3 2023-03-07 |
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OBS 2003 Raffle Scope Winners 2023-03-07 |
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| Darla and Peter Flynn won the 12.5" OBS Raffle Scope. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Allen separating the mirror from the cell 2023-03-07 |
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| This mirror is going to be realuminized. It had huge gobs of glue holding it to the cell. Don't do this to your mirrors. They must be free to adjust to temperature changes. |
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Center marking a primary mirror 2023-03-07 |
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| Ralph, right, and Chris center marking Chris's mirror | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Mirror Grinding Demo at the OBS 2023-03-07 |
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| Mike showing Scott the proper grinding stroke at the 2023 OBS | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Collimation Class at the 2023 OBS 2023-03-07 |
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| OBS 2003 Collimation Class with Ralph showing secondary mirror rotation. Ralph and Allen showed traditional collimation tools, like the sight tube and auto collimator, laser collimation and the digital OCal video collimation. |
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16 and 8 inch mirrors 2022-09-18 |
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| We recently had a half dozen mirrors and mirror blanks donated to the club. Here are a couple of finished and coated mirrors. These should make awesome telescopes. |
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Ralph setting up the Robo Foucault tester 2022-09-18 |
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| Here is Ralph setting up the parameters for a mirror test in the Robo Foucault tester. Since the Mirror Lab lost its home the testing is being preformed at Ron's house (Thanks Ron!). The mirror lab gang gets together at least once a month to discuss progress on various telescope and mount progress, and of course, eat. |
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OCAL Electronic Collimator 2022-09-14 |
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| We have been testing the OCAL Electronic Collimator. This is it on a 2005 era Dobsonian telescope. If it had not rained here for the past two months I would tell you if the stars looked sharper. The laser collimator says that it's good. |
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Chris rebuilding part of his dob 2022-05-09 |
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| Chris's scope needed a few tweaks. The secondary two vane holder was replaced with a four vane model for better collimation adjustment and the cage was rebuilt to make it a bit lighter and squarer. The Mirror box trunnions needed to be include a center pivot point for his new digital setting circle encoders. Chris and Allen met at Ralph's garage for an afternoon of wood dust making and deep scope design discussions. |
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