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Anyone care to guess what this lens setup was used for?

Alaskan

Alaskan

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Found this on ebay, don't know what it is yet, can anyone speculate? Has Hughes Aircraft written on a property tag attached to it too. The gold objective lens is about 6 inches/150mm diameter, unit is 14 inches tall, 13 pounds weight:

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Telescope, projector maybe? :o

Don't know much about this stuff, but that looks massive. What was the price for it?
 
Wow, Alaskan. You buy more on speculation than anyone else I know. It might be a good buy, or it might be a bust. I'm hoping it turns out to be something you find useful, but right now, who knows. :)
 
No doubt I will use it, I have strong interest in both Near-IR as well as VIS and large AR coated lenses like this are difficult to find. I suspect this is a night vision scope or perhaps just IR, maybe part of a LIDAR system.
 
Lens assembly off the U2 Dragon Lady spy planes used for high resolution imaging during the 60's over Russia.
Gary Powers brought it back and now his family's put it up on ebay.

:D
 
That won't be cheap. You'd think they would put it with an auction house as eBay isn't the place for something of that historic caliber.
 
The name Space optics suggest a modular telescope part that can be swapped in or out.
 
It is a beam expander that screws right onto your M9 threading of 12mm, 20mm, 25mm and 35mm modules for your portable laser.:eg:
 
Thank you Encap! RB, I liked the Gary Powers story, wish it were true. I'm going to need an adapter to put this thing on the end of a M9 lens.

Edit, back to add:

I wrote them and then googling found this:

http://www.tobyhanna.army.mil/mission/c4isr_mission/EONV.pdf: Electro-Optics/Night Vision.

I was hoping it was a night vision unit, I have some Gen. 1 light amplification tubes which would probably work well with this. The reason I believed it was probably NV was the output end (or input if used as an expander), it is much like another NV lens assembly I have, but that one is much smaller.

I don't know what the big difference might be between a NV telescope and any other telescope, except perhaps the field of view is wider for a given lens diameter, does anyone know? Is there a difference on the coating? I will have to ask more questions once the manufacturer answers, I got an out of office until Sept 12 reply.

With the "Laser" marking on the side, I'm wondering if this is part of a LIDAR system but I have doubts a LIDAR would use a light intensifier tube, no way to measure return nanosecond pulses with that. In that case, the back side of this unit is wrong for a simple detector and this sure appears to have been designed for a NV tube or perhaps a special CCD camera chip, but I've never seen a camera chip wide enough to be used with the short FL 2 inch diameter back aperture this thing has.
 
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Ha ha, unfortunately, the output of a stack of diodes like that is too wide, it isn't close enough to a point source like our single emitter diodes we use in pointers, but if its outputs were fiber coupled, they could have a relatively tight source spot and then be be collimated into a round beam of IR light. I saw that same auction four years ago, interesting how much power a diode array can produce.
 
They have it focused down to a useful size bar, but some shaping optics would be needed to true up the beam, I doubt it would work easily or at all but if you could zoom the majority of that power down you just might be able to pop a balloon on the edge of the horizon. :D

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