Re: [Utah-astronomy] Making a 36" from many smaller mirrors

That's the only way to do it, without active control. But it's essentially a single mirror that way, but missing much of it's surface and probably not any lighter than a monolithic mirror of the same equivalent aperture. On 8/26/15, Wiggins Patrick <paw@digis.net> wrote:

It was talked about in the early days of SPOC. IIRC it was going to be an assemblage of 5 or 6 smaller mirrors cemented to a base of some sort and ground and polished as a unit. But in the end we went with a single mirror.