LBT Mirror Casting
Credit: Steward Observatory Mirror Lab

LBT Mirror Shipping
Credit: Steward Observatory Mirror Lab

In general, I am a poor hands–on experimentalist; I have been more valuable for my ideas. In the case of the Large Binocular Telescope, one of the many large telescopes made possible by the University of Arizona Mirror Lab, I was there in the concept development and then other people got in and were very important in making it what it is today. But the basic concept of the two mirrors and their spacing came out of the work that I did early on.

When we needed a site for the Large Binocular Telescope, I founded an excellent site on Mount Graham, Arizona, and then there came a whole group of people that wanted to find any excuse for not putting an observatory up there! And one of the excuses they found was that there was a red squirrel there, and even though it was very similar to other red squirrels, it could be named an endangered species just because of its isolation. So I looked at all the observations to find out what was going on, and I found that the red squirrel was mainly living in the place where the public was going already. Higher up where the telescopes were to be, they would come in at times when the food was good and then vanish again when the food wasn’t so good. But nonetheless, we did have to work on taking care of the red squirrel as well as building the observatory.