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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Kelly Anderson testing his new dew heater controller 2017-06-10 |
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| Kelly Anderson testing his new dew heater controller that he built at the Mirror Lab. The power supply is showing at 13v the two dew scrips are drawing 0.548 amps |
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Dario and Devin;'s scope gets first (day)Light 2017-04-07 |
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| The scope focused beautifully on the 1/2 mile away target and shortly after the Moon. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Dario and Devin attach the focuser 2017-04-07 |
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| With Ralph (left) as the master hole cutter and driller Dario and Devin attach the optical components to the tube. |
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It's a Wrap! 2017-04-07 |
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| The painted wrap is on the tube and it's a thing of beauty. Nice work Devin! | ||||||||||||||||||||
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The dob wrap is almost ready 2017-04-07 |
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| The transformation of the blank wrap to a masterpiece over about two hours was amazing. It will be on the 10in dob soon. |
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Devin starts painting his telescope wrap 2017-04-07 |
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| This started off as a plain sheet of plastic and a few cans of spray paint. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Ron Jones (left) recipient of the 2017 John Dobson Award 2017-02-12 |
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| Ron Jones received a well deserved John Dobson award for exceptional public service in astronomy. This included public outreach, teaching mirror grinding and telescope making and astronomy mentoring as well as making more than a dozen telescopes. This is Ron (left) receiving his award with the Telescope Lab's founder, Paul McNabb, Congratulations Ron! |
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Rough Grinding a Honeycomb Mirror Blank 2016-11-10 |
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| Mike Davis has begun rough grinding another of his home made, honeycomb-back, light weight, mirror blanks. Here he is using a couple of stacked barbell wights for the tool and 60 mesh silicon carbide grit. |
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Unusual Condiment Tray 2016-11-04 |
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| At the SPAC October picnic we used a 16 inch mirror as the condiment tray. It was recently started with 60 grit and had about 80 thousandths of an inch of depth on it. |
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3D Printed Focuser 2016-09-23 |
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| This is Tom Spano's 3D printed Crayford focuser. The white area was printed and it is internally using a honeycombed design for strength. |
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