Interferometer – Want to buy one for $50K?

For those of you who are regular followers of this blog, this post might come across as pretty random, but allow me to explain. My father is a retired optical engineer who used to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. He worked on the Hubble Space Telescope for a number of years as well as many other satellites and spacecraft.

Several years ago he designed the interferometer shown on the right, built one of them for JPL, then built three more at home and sold two; one to Omega Optical in Vermont, the other to Barr Associates in Massachusetts. Now he’s wanting to sell the last one. I”m not going to explain what an interferometer is because if you don’t already know then chances are you don’t want to pay $50K for one.

My dad named his creation the Broadband Achromatic Twyman-Green (BAT) Interferometer. It was designed to measure interferometrically the transmitted wavefront of optical quality filters. Here are some of the details:

• Clear aperture of 2.3 inches square
• Bandwidths as narrow as 10 nm, transmissions as low as 10%
• Wavelength range- 250 to 1100 nm
• Lightweight – 36 pounds
• Operates on a desktop with room lights on
• Comes with two light sources, full documentation
• Includes a video copy processor
• Used to make the filters for the Hubble Wide Field and Planetary Camera

So, if you happen to be one of the few companies in the world who would be interested in purchasing such a thing, shoot me an email at jsteimle@mwi.com and I’ll get you in touch with my father.