Popular Science Best of What's New 2009

A quote....

"For 22 years, Popular Science has honored the innovations that surprise and amaze us - those that make a positive impact on our world today and challenge our views of what's possible in the future." said Mark Jannot, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Science.
"The Best of What's New Award is the magazine's top honor, and the the 100 winners - chosen from among thousands of entrants - represent the highest level of achievement in their fields."

We are obviously very pleased to have received the BOWN 2009 award in the Recreational Catagory for the New LS60 Pressure Tuned Telescope. See page 58 of the December issue, or check on line when it goes live.

Although it has long been known that altitude changes move the center bandpass of an air spaced filter, it wasn't until June of this year that the reality of a system that incorporates this technology was brought out into the mainstream. A simple system that simply increases and decreases the air pressure inside a sealed cavity.
This change in air pressure results in a change in refractive index which alters the interference of the light as it enters the cavity. Simplicity! This system basically does the same job as heat would do to a solid design, but instantly, without power, at the turn of a wrist.

Look for some exciting new developements from Lunt Solar in the next 6 months. Along with some R&D projects which I will continue to discuss as I can, we are close to completion on the developement of several new products..

Thanks! to Popular Science for recognizing Lunt Solar as a leader in it's field.

First Week of November (Last Part)

As of November 1st we officially began to move into our new expanded facilities next door. Our landlord, Steve, has been nice enough to let us store our cases, shipping containers etc. over there for the last few months until the facilities were ready. The new facilities increased our square footage by about another 40%.

The expansion incudes a few more offices, a nice education/AV area with kitchen and restrooms, and in mid area a nice big fully climate controlled room for our upcoming coating facilities with large double doors to our current assembly area. The back of the area has been heated and cooled, but is currently used as a main storage area. During the buildout of our current area, we had the fore thought to put 800 Amps of 3 phase power in, so the new area has plenty of juice to keep us going.

I'll have to get some pictures up, but it's hard to believe that we first moved in to the current building in February of 2008. The building had a small kitchen, and a lobby. There were NO bathroom facilities. (We made friends with the neighbors very quickly ;). The first 2 Continuous Polishers were working in the kitchen area on very long extension cords. I had an electric heater on one wall and an air conditioner on the other, both fighting to keep the un-insulated room at +/-1 degree.

6 months later we were able to move out of the kitchen and populate the new building just in time for our open house..

14 months later we are still expanding and I am still working very hard to increase our capacity to meet the ever growing demand.

First Week of November (Part 2)

During this week we finally finished our 6th Continuous Polisher.

All the polishers at Lunt are custom designed and fabricated on site. They are currently all 48" diameter with a capacity for about a 12" part. In our application we use plastic fixtures on the lap to hold multiple sizes. We also utilize a large conditioning wheel that runs continiuously on the lap to maintain the required flatness to the parts being polished.

The 48" granite lap is supported on a thick steel plate which mounts via a very heavy duty machine bearing to our custom tables. Our tables are designed and manufactured to be very solid. The lap is driven by a 5HP motor with a large gear reducer, all controlled by a variable speed controller. Due to the fact that our laps generally run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we have ensured that all components are over sized for the job.

The granite forms the solid and thermally stable foundation for the polishing pitch. We use a Gugolz fine pitch. We heat the pitch up in a very large pot and once fully liquid, we add secondary components to ensure that the lap will remain firm and stable for long periods of time.
These additions make the lap very "hard". The trade off is that it takes many hours just to push a lap 1/4 wave in each direction. The benefit is that the lap remains flat for extended periods of time, allowing us to finish an entire batch of glass in that timeframe. This also ensures that the laps cannot drift too far while being run overnight. The hardness of the lap and the fine polishing compound assure that our flats are very precise and have no roll off at the edge.

Our next project is the fabrication of a 36" Continuous Grinder. David, our glass grinder, spends 8 hours a day grinding glass from rough cut to fine grind. A second machine will allow us to provide just a little more ground parts than the optics shop currently needs freeing David to hekp in other areas.

In addition to the 6 48" CPs, we are in the middle of construction on our 72" Continuous Polisher. The granite has arrived, and the steel base is finished. This machine will be used to manufacture precision flats up to 24" in diameter. Recent large flats were finished on a large draper style machine. Although we eventually met the specifications of 1/10th wave over 20", we have certainly concluded that a large CP is the way to go.

Outreach in Riverside, CA

I wanted to share my experience with this new gear.

I don't know what Andy does when he matches this scopes and filters up but I am just completely blown away by the views with the new LS60THa scope and my original LS50FHa filter. This set up starts to mimics views I had years back with a buddies older Coronado Solarmax 90 filter on a TV101 scope! I knew double stacking was the way to go but seeing it real time with this latest technology really reinforces it.

I got first sunlight Saturday morning and could see so much detail on a new emerging active region that day. The bright spot with detailed twisting was very easy to see and study. The orange peel was so intense that the sun's globe was starting to show the classic 3D quality of truly high end H-Alpha rigs. And, amazingly, the double stack even at 50mm aperture was still able to show the prominences extremely well even while showing all this surface detail. How can this be!!? Most smaller aperture double stack H-Alpha filters and scopes in the past just showed higher surface detail at the strong expense of easily seen edge detail. Not both at the same time. This little additional gift to the views is just more iceing on the solar cake.

Using the scope and filter set up at the large STEP Conference outreach here in Riverside for the last two days presented easily seen surface detail for every single student and teacher. Every single one. No guessing. There was never any......"well I see it sort of but I'm not sure". Even the younger children could view the orange peel, filaments and active regions clearly. Lots of smiles or "that's so cool!" or "that's really our sun? Are you kidding me?....awwwwesome!!"

I now have the ultimate solar outreach tool that can be use to share our star with many thousands of the public of all ages over the years. I have tools to do serious outreach all day long. Not just at night. For an outreach junkie like me this is true Nirvana.
I thank all of you guys involved at Lunt Solar Systems for bringing this company to market. You folks really are continuing the vision of bringing H-Alpha observing to the masses. All I can say is your service and products speak for themselves.

.....Thanks for these very kind words, we look forward to hearing about ongoing outreach from Riverside and in your area.....

Thanks again,
P. Agins
Riverside Astronomical Society
Outreach program

The NEW Website!!

The new Lunt Solar Website is almost finished!
........It is almost finished... right?..........

With DNS transfer scheduled for Wednesday, November 11th I am excited about finally starting on a website dedicated to everything Solar. With live streams in Ha and CaK, news and events, forums, galleries, and editorials provided by the users of solar equipment.

We would like to see Solar enthusiasts get involved. Jot down a few stories, ideas or experiences and submit them for the site. We will be featuring articles on past and upcoming events, your local outreach efforts, and a chance to share you knowledge of observing and imaging. And please include pictures!!

The new community area will be dedicated to everything solar it does NOT matter what brand of scope you use. I have been involved in the solar filter business since about 1998, I understand that Lunt is not the only manufacture of Solar equipment, the fact is we all share the same interests and should do what we can to promote the hobby of Solar to everyone. I am certainly proud of the equipment I helped produce before Lunt, and it is a result of that experience that I am able to push it's continued evolution..

So put pen to paper and submit "articles of interest" to editorial@luntsolarsystems.com

We also need to get the word out about the new website and the blogs (there are 11 of us in this area).

The blog will be attached to the new site once the site is live..

First Week of November (Part 1)

The first week of November has flown by. A week ago today we were getting ready for Holloween night, it'll be Thanksgiving before you know it!!.

Testing, new products, and website were the projects of the week.

The image at left is the New LS152T/PT. This is currently the largest dedicated telescope that we manufacture. This is a working prototype and was on display at PATS. It had been my intention to take it outside on the Sunday, but the mount that I was going to borrow was sold on Saturday. I did try the mount it was displayed on, but that was a drop waiting to happen.

The internal lens sets for the system are almost finished. The prototype lenses were "off the shelf" and weren't quite optimized for the system proviving only about a 70% sweetspot in the center of field. The production lenses have been designed to the optical system. They are also slightly larger than the prototype given more aperture to the beam.

The LS152 contains an unobstructed 60mm HR (high resolution) etalon. This is a new etalon design and provides for high signal to noise ratio which greatly darkens that background allowing for stunning contrast on edge details.

I have already had one person ask about the unobstructed 60mm, and before the questions are raised and the assumptions made in other forums, I will state that we will not be introducing the LS60F until Summer of 2010. Due to the very high demand for the other products, we will not be tooling this particular size at the expense of current production. Our LS60F production is currently limited to the LS152T, and takes the place of the production schedule for the LS200T.

The estimated US$ retail for this instrument is $7,495.00 (this does NOT include the CaK module). For those that have the LS200T on order you will be receiving the LS152T at no additional cost. If you purchased the CaK option for the LS200T you will also be receiving that at no additional cost. As you know, the LS200T was introduced at 5k. It was the intention to increase this price once the system was shipping and had good reviews. As I will explain in another post, the LS200T could never meet both the performance requirements that I had set for it, while also meeting the strict safety requirements. The trade offs were leading to unacceptable compromizes on both sides. Safety will always be of the highest priority to ANY solar product.

For those that choose to accept the exchange, I promise that you will be receiving a solar system that exceeds my expectaions for what the LS200T was going to do. By defualt the delays have allowed for the incorporation of a 60mm etalon instead of a 50mm. The new HR (high resolution) coatings will be incorporated standard, and the value of the package itself will provide a good return on investment should you ever choose to sell.

For those that cannot accept the exchange, we will refund any deposit in full.

Recent Trip to Mt Lemmon Sky Center

This image was recently e-mailed to me from my Landlord. He and a group from his church spent the day and part of the evening at the Mt Lemmon Sky Center.
For those that attended the Open House at Lunt Solar a year ago, you will remember the visit to 9,000 ft. It was about this time of year and although the weather was clear and sunny, the temperatures were very cold.
Shortly after the visit we donated a LS100T/PT to the facility in appreciation of their hosting the event and providing everyone with a look thru some of their large scopes. Everyone had a great time.

We chose the LS100T/PT specifically because of the high altitude. A large aperture scope in great skies without the issues of air pressure to the air spaced etalon.

I hadn't given much thought to the scope on Mt Lemmon until I received this picture. Steve and the group were wandering around the domes, when Steve recognized the name on the 100T. He'd never actually looked thru one of my larger scopes before and expressed his excitment at having the chance to look thru one of our systems "in the wild". He was very pleased with the view. Everyone in the group had a chance to view the active region of last week.

This scope was provided to allow the Center to provide visitors a chance to view the Sun. The Mt Lemmon Sky Center is open to the public, and often receives large groups of children and adults who are interested in learning more about astronomy as well as the nature of the mountain.

For more information on the Sky Center you can visit http://skycenter.arizona.edu/

The facilities were remodeled about a year ago and I have to say that they did a fantastic job. From large kitchen areas, to private bedrooms, and a first rate meeting/audio visual area.

We are hoping to visit the center at our next Solar event which is now tentatively planned for March 2010.