LAS Meeting on March 20

The Longmont Astronomical Society will meet 7 to 9 pm in the Community Room at the Front Range Community College, 2190 Miller Drive, Longmont, CO on March 20. The speaker will be John Figoski with Ball Aerospace & Technologies. He will talk about the design and fabrication of the QuickBird telescope.

John Figoski has been an optical designer for 31 years designing and building telescopes and space instruments for NASA and the Government.  He received a Master’s Degree in Optics from the University of Arizona, Optical Sciences Center.  He has worked at Perkin-Elmer on the Hubble Telescope, Hughes Santa Barbara Research Center on the NASA MODIS instrument for earth observations, and for the past twelve years at Ball Aerospace.  He has pioneered design and test methods for large aperture, off-axis, high-resolution optical systems.  At Ball Aerospace he has been the optics lead for the 60 cm diameter QuickBird I, QuickBird II, and WorldView I telescopes and is currently investigating new designs for 1.0 and 2.0 meter diameter telescope systems.

As an amateur astronomer he has built a 6-inch F/4 and 12-inch F/5 Newtonian telescope as well as a 4-inch Cassegrain.  After a mid-life hiatus from serious observing, and being thoroughly intimidated by the digital age, he currently enjoys re-discovering all the faint fuzzy things visible in the dark skies of Colorado and Wyoming.

Presentation Abstract

The Ball High-Resolution Camera imaging system is a ground breaking telescope in many ways.  It is the largest diameter, largest field of view, un-obscured telescope with diffraction-limited performance ever flown in space.  This telescope is the heart of the DigitalGlobe QuickBird I, QuickBird II, and WorldView I commercial remote sensing instruments.  These systems provide the high-resolution images of earth from space that has given birth to and is sustaining the rapidly-expanding market of commercial imagery for everyday use.

This presentation provides an overview of the optics, mechanical structure, imaging CCD array, spacecraft, and launch of this revolutionary system.  From an amateur astronomer’s point of view, while this is not an astronomical instrument, this presentation provides a glimpse into the detail and complexity that that goes into building every instrument that flies in space.  As part of the local astronomy community, it is also impressive to see what is happening right in our own neighborhood.