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| Building Museum Quality Replicas of Galileo's Telescopes |
| Jim and Rhoda Morris |
| Thursday, Sep 14, 2006 at 8:00 PM |
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This month's meeting will feature Jim and Rhoda Morris speaking on their replicas of Galileo's telescopes.
This is the first public showing of the extraordinary replicas, probably the most unique and faithful ever fabricated, of the two famous Galileo telescopes: the gilded leather telescope (commissioned by the Griffith Observatory in L.A.) and the wood painted telescope (made for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago).
Building museum grade replicas of these telescopes, the earliest known telescopes of any significance, has great challenges if one is to produce quality replicas that perform as the originals did and represent what they would have looked like when new. As seen today they have 400 years of wear and tear, been repaired, were poorly documented in their early years and suffered from inventory errors. One of the lenses was lost, and there is conflicting information on the web and among historians and science scholars in the literature on several issues.
To start from a known baseline and to reconcile these differences the authors have spent hundreds of hours searching the technical literature. They even visited the originals and dug through museum archives in Florence Italy. This visit revealed an up to now unknown and very novel type of tube construction employed by Galileo and his craftsmen.
With their background as physicist and chemist and their experimental skills the authors set about to make the most accurate replicas of these telescopes in existence today. Their talk will cover the challenges and all aspects of the construction of the telescopes including materials, the novel methods of constructions, optics and the processes to transform photographs of the ornamental designs into hot stamp dies for the more than 400 individual applications on the curved tube surface.
These telescopes are more important than their beauty and the fact that they ushered in the beginning of modern astronomy When challenged why so much effort and so many hours were spent on the details of building these telescopes, even on parts that are not readily seen, the authors have an answer that relate to the “Galileo syndrome”. Come and hear about it.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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