My Lovely 302mm Wollensak. They don't make stuff like this anymore.

[Duolab123]

Air Force, we are talking super secret flying submarine Jonny Quest stuff.

If you are hot stuff 4 elements is plenty!!!

[Bob Salomon]

Air Force, we are talking super secret flying submarine Jonny Quest stuff.

If you are hot stuff 4 elements is plenty!!!

You do know that the Vivatar Solid Cat lens that they sold for 35mm SLR Cameras was developed and designed for the U2 by Perkin Elmer in Norwalk, CT, don’t you?
It was a terrible performer on 35mm but then it was designed to be used through a quartz window on the plane.

[mdarnton]

These lenses are OK. That's why I have three (of the 302mm, including one SF in a shutter) and a bunch of other FL as well. Tessars are my faves.

[Duolab123]

You do know that the Vivatar Solid Cat lens that they sold for 35mm SLR Cameras was developed and designed for the U2 by Perkin Elmer in Norwalk, CT, don’t you?
It was a terrible performer on 35mm but then it was designed to be used through a quartz window on the plane.

I used Perkin Elmer spectrometers, I was going to say something about Perkin Elmer. They made the perfectly incorrect optics for Hubble. Not sure who dropped the ball,on the Hubbell, something like that usually involves tedious engineering reviews where people will sign off on anything just to get out of the meeting. Like the Mars miss on where JPL hit Mars at several thousand MPH because people were using English instead of SI units and forgot to convert back. :-)

[reddesert]

I used Perkin Elmer spectrometers, I was going to say something about Perkin Elmer. They made the perfectly incorrect optics for Hubble. Not sure who dropped the ball,on the Hubbell, something like that usually involves tedious engineering reviews where people will sign off on anything just to get out of the meeting. Like the Mars miss on where JPL hit Mars at several thousand MPH because people were using English instead of SI units and forgot to convert back. :-)

It's well understood what happened to the Hubble optics, although it may not have been widely transmitted outside the scientific community. It is probably in Eric Chaisson's book "The Hubble Wars." Perkin-Elmer screwed up, badly. They had multiple tests for the mirror figure, including a classical interferometric test and a more precise test using a device called a null corrector. The two tests disagreed and rather than solve the problem, they went with the more precise null corrector. They actually submitted an interferogram with the offending wavy part trimmed off (this part I heard in a colloquium from a senior scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, back in the 90s). The problem was that the null corrector had been assembled incorrectly (incorrect spacing), so spherical aberration was ground into the mirror. Actually, now that I look at it, the wikipedia summary of this incident seems pretty accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble...#Flawed_mirror

Perkin-Elmer made a lot of good things, but as sometimes happens in large projects, the pressure to deliver caused a failure of project management judgment. At least it didn't kill anybody. These failures happen, but they shouldn't.

[Steve Goldstein]

Bob Salomon wrote: You do know that the Vivatar Solid Cat lens that they sold for 35mm SLR Cameras was developed and designed for the U2 by Perkin Elmer in Norwalk, CT, don’t you?
It was a terrible performer on 35mm but then it was designed to be used through a quartz window on the plane.

Bob, do you happen to know how thick that quartz window was? It might be interesting to try a piece a glass in front of the 600mm Vivitar solid cat I bought on a lark.

[Bob Salomon]

Bob, do you happen to know how thick that quartz window was? It might be interesting to try a piece a glass in front of the 600mm Vivitar solid cat I bought on a lark.

No, way back in the mid 60s I was managing a camera department on Route 7 in Norwalk, about a mile south of Perkin Elmer. We had a pretty good selection of astronomical telescopes, both reflectors and refractors. We started doing a very brisk business with them with a couple of engineers from P.E.. they would buy a few each week.
Finally, after a few months they came into the store with a very heavy lens and wanted to know if we or the manufacturers of the telescopes wanted to buy back the telescopes minus the optics. No, there was no interest in that. Then they handed me the lens which was what they made as a prototype from the telescope optics, it was the start of the Solid Cat!

You might be able to get specs on the window from NASA, CIA, USAF or USN sites. But we never pursued it with the engineers. I did buy one from Vivitar to do some sports for a sports magazine and our local newspapers on Canon F1s but it was simply not sharp enough hand held or tripod mounted at the distances we shot from for ball games.

[Greg]

Bob, do you happen to know how thick that quartz window was? It might be interesting to try a piece a glass in front of the 600mm Vivitar solid cat I bought on a lark.

Recently acquired a 600mm Vivitar Series 1 solid cat. Price was too good to pass up on. Tired it out visually focusing through the viewfinder and the image was not all that great. Tried it out a second time but with magnified LIVE VIEW... Focus is very sensitive but doable. Resulting image was amazingly sharp from corner to corner when I compared it to my non-reflex 500mm Nikkor. Light falloff is negligible when compared to my 500mm Reflex Nikkor. Lens didn't come with the rear (UV) filter which I believe should be always used with the lens since it was part of the lenses optical configuration. Not sure what gives, but the lens is definitely a keeper. Hope to use it for IR photography. Have read that visual focusing actually works with shooting IR... have to check that out over the holiday. Will post results.