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The Shot Glass Drop competition gave students and young professionals a chance to put their on-the-spot design talents to the test. This clip shows a “victory drop” of the winning design by Jessica Serra.

The ICACC meeting in Daytona Beach wraps up today. I left on Wednesday after more than a week on the conference circuit. I was ready to come home, but I confess that the balmy sunshine was working for me. (It’s cold, cloudy and snowy where I live.)

Here are some final sights and sounds from the meeting, but I’ll have more to say about what I saw and heard in the weeks to come.

Monday evening's reception for students and young professionals was well attended and, according to reports, a lot of fun.

A vendor and customers talk shop at Tuesday's Expo.

Posters were displayed on the perimeter of the Expo floor.

While the Expo was going on, so was a Shot Glass Drop competition for students and young professionals. Sponsored by Schott Glass, contestants had about 30 minutes to construct a contraption out of 30 plastic drinking straws that would protect a free falling Schott-made shot glass. Most of the 16 entries survived to the maximum height, which was in the neighborhood of 12 feet. If they reached the maximum height, contestants then were required to remove two straws each round until only one survived. The winning design won with 24 straws. The video clip above shows winner Jessica Serra’s “victory drop,” one final drop after she was being declared the victor. It survived.

The glass and straws.

Intense concentration from a team.

And the winner is Jessica Serra, shown with judges Greg Hilmas (left) and Sean Landwehr. Jessica recently joined the staff of Pratt-Whitney.

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Artist’s rendering of mirror arrangement for Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile. Credit: GMT.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who’s the best mirror maker of them all?”

In the story of Snow White, the magic mirror is an important supporting character. It sees into places its interrogator cannot and reports back on the who, what and where and shows the action. To create the fantastical mirror, Disney used a talented team of storywriters and celluloid artists.

Similarly, astronomers look out from observatories into places that are inaccessible to humankind, in part because our lifespans are too short. To build the instruments that allow them to do so, they turn to teams of specialists to craft the mirrors that are amazing in their own right. Among the best of the mirror makers is the team at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory in Tucson.

Last week the lab cast the second of seven massive glass mirrors that will be shipped to Chile for installation in the Giant Magellan Telescope. When completed, GMT will be able to acquire images 10-times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. The six outer mirrors are off-axis paraboloids, which makes them “the greatest optics challenge ever undertaken in astronomical optics by a large factor,” according to Roger Engel in a press release. Engel is the director of the SOML.

The 8.4-meter-diameter (about 27 feet) mirrors are cast from 21 tons of borosilicate glass provided by the Ohara Corp. Glass chunks weighing 4-5 kilograms are inspected and carefully layed out over a ceramic mold.The glass is melted at 1,165°C (at which point the glass has a honey-like viscosity) in a furnace that rotates at about 4 rpm. (See the spinning furnace in the video.) The spinning helps form the parabolic shape and reduces the amount of finishing needed later. According to a brochure (pdf) from the SOML, the furnace will spin rapidly for four or five days, and then at a much slower rate as the mirror goes through a three-month-long controlled cooling.

Last week’s melting and casting process of the second mirror took about 22 hours and it is now in the lengthy cooling phase. After removal from the furnace, the mirror undergoes a rough grinding step and is polished to a finish that is within 25 nanometer of specifications.

The backs of the mirrors are cast in a honeycomb configuration to reduce their weight, and more importantly, to allow the mirrors to thermally equilibrate quickly. Temperature changes on the mountaintop are rapid and can be fairly large, but the borosilicate glass has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, which allows it to remain stable despite temperature changes.

The facility expects to cast one mirror per year to complete the project. Each mirror will be shipped to Chile after its finishing is completed.

A lot of space is needed to make castings this large and to do the post-processing, and one might wonder where a large, urban university found space for the facility. Under the football field!

The SOML brochure lists the mirrors made by the SOML since 1985. The university has other mirror fabrication projects underway. A recent Eureka Alert press release describes a multi-million dollar project to polish a 4.2-meter-wide mirror for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope in Hawaii. The mirror blank is being made by Schott in Mainz, Germany.

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Schott’s stairway is comprised of 140 fused-glass panels and 195 solar modules.

SCHOTT, one of the world’s largest and most innovative glassmakers, reports the accomplishment of another first - the combination of solar panels and colored glass in the design of a stunningly beautiful stairway facade, integrated into the walls of the firm’s administration building in Mainz, Germany. Designed by German artist Paul Wurdel, the beautiful solar stairway combines 140 of the firm’s “Artista” fused-color glass panels with 195 irregularly-arranged “Asi Thru” photovoltaic modules from SCHOTT Solar in Putzbrunn, Germany. The 24-meter high “solar façade,” performs three functions. It generates power, lowers energy costs and - thanks to its clear and vibrant colors - also serves as an attractive “business card for the firm,” says Udo Ehlers, head of SCHOTT’s architectural glass sales. “It’s really turned what used to be a rather somber staircase into a colorful world of adventure,” he comments. “You get a rainbow of watercolor images in various shades, and it becomes even more dynamic, when observers move around.” SCHOTT’s plant in Grünenplan, Germany, processed the glass design, and the combination of “fusing glass and solar modules for the first time ever posed a unique challenge for all those involved in the project,” according to Hartmut Glenewinkel, the project’s design consultant and manufacturing director. Glaswerke Arnold, based in Merkendorf, Germany, was given the challenging job of fabricating the triple-layer insulated laminate panel. The outside layer of the module consists of partially tempered glass panes, backed by randomly placed, laminated solar modules.

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