Renee Delaap (pictured above) is the DFM optical technician.  She is in charge of turning the blank piece of Zerodur into MCAO's 1.3 meter telescope mirror.  She is in the process of moving the mirror from the test cell to the polishing machine.  Dr. Melsheimer is helping.  You can see his hand in the picture on the right.  

Fabricating a 1.5 m mirror is a time consuming process.  The mirror has been ground with a coarse grit.  It is now in the polishing stage, which is done with a finer grit. A  lap is used to polish a telescope mirror.  The above picture shows the MCAO mirror in the polishing machine with a T lap and round lap.  The mirror blank moves in a counter clock  motion while the two polishing laps move up and down. The next step will be the figuring process.