I have about 20 unused hard drives sitting around and I think it would be interesting to use one platter as the main mirror or perhaps all of them as an array. It seems most telescopes (even amateur ones) used curved mirrors which might make this infeasible.
They need to be curved so yes this isn't going to work, also hard disk platters are coated with cobalt-iron shit and awful for optical clarity.
You seem like to habe knowledge about what op says. What does he/she mean with telescopes and used curved mirrors? I know to use redundant hdds as an image of the main hdd like a clone device. But what does that mean in this case?
>hard disk platters are coated with cobalt-iron shit and awful for optical clarity.
Basically this.
OP, learn how to grind lenses. It's literally a dying art and optical components still need to be made.
Nah just make wind chimes out of them.
this. platters make that cool sound when you suspend them with string and hit them with a metal rod. make platter windchimes. sell on etsy. profit.
Platters are about as reflective as a cd and are almost perfectly flat
No.. plates are as reflective as any mirror
Not curved can't use it as a primary mirror. Could use it as a shit tier first surface mirror however it's not very reflective and a shit tier fsm from Amazon that is about the size of all your drives combined is about $12 delivered. So you could do it for the sheer hell of it but $12 would buy you something better. Might make 12 recycling the aluminum in the drives... Probably not but maybe.
Don't know how flexible platters are but you can probably force a curvature in them. They already have a hole in the center after all.
The platters are basically ceramic.
You may manage to get the tiniest amount of flex, but it's pretty likely to shatter.
At any rate, that won't make anything close to a spherical curvature, so it won't make a very good image.
This. There isn't any way you'll get even a basic parabolic deflection from bending a disk. There are equations for it in most engineering references, like Roark's handbook here.
some platters are ceramic ( I know the dude that sold the patent to seagate ). no he did not work for Nintendo.
>might make this infeasible
There's no might about it, it's just plain infeasible. HDD platters aren't flexible and aren't optical quality mirrors.