Bob Goff, owner of A.X.E(Astronomically Xenogenic Enterprises)located in Tucson,AZ
passed away on 12/23, at the age of 59.
Bob was a master optician, no doubt one
of the all time greatest in fact,he acheived
levels of precision better than 1/100 wave.
He was the kind of guy who would take time
out from a very important project to help out
an atm, he had a solution to every possible
problem one might encounter, and he was a very
nice guy, it was a pleasure to know him.
Im sure David Levy will write some kind of
article/tribute about him in an upcoming issue
of sky and telescope magazine(or is it astro-
nomy magazine?) i know bob and david were good
friends.
A visit to Bob's lab was allways fun and very
interesting, one minute he would be testing a
12" optical flat, a few minutes later he would
check the progress of another flat on a ring
polisher, often he would have three digital
timers pinned to his shirt keeping track of the
machine polishing of several simultaneous jobs.
His accomplishments are vast and go way beyond
the scope of this posting, to name just a few that
im aware of: he made the optical system used with america's first spy satellite, made the optical
system utilized in the u2 spy planes in the 60's,
ground/polished/figured hundreds of telescope
mirrors ranging in diameters from a few inch's
up to 50" or so, optical flats, refiguring of
celestron/meade corrector plates,in fact he was
the chief optician for celestron back in the early 70's,(if you have an old celestron scope,
you have a very good one indeed!).
Well i just thought i would let everyone know
of this loss, Myself and many other people will
greatly miss Bob Goff.

• MY DAD - julmoongoddess - June 30, 2005 - 20:25 UTC