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>
>Incidentally, my plan was to make a setup 
>similar to the breathtakingly expensive 
>Freiberger artificial horizon available from various sellers.

I looked up the price being asked by various 
sellers - around �500... Ouch! I bought mine many 
years ago when the price was nowhere near so horrifying.

Many years ago I played with the idea of floating 
a glass mirror on a bowl of mercury. The 
advantage of using mercury was that surface 
tension effects kept the glass "raft" from 
touching the sides of the bowl. This is a problem 
that is going to afflict anyone who tries 
floating the raft on water - the raft will head 
straight for the side of the bowl (or seem to) and stick there.

There were, however, problems in trying to float 
a glass mirror on mercury. The mirror would not 
sit flat. On floating a piece of clear glass, the 
problem became apparent. Due to the fact that the 
surface of the mercury was not scrupulously 
clean, irregular bubbles of air were being trapped under the glass.

I decided that these problems were too much to 
cope with and that these were obviously the 
reasons why this form of AH had not gained any momentum before.

Geoffrey Kolbe

   

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