If you spend your weekends at the grinding stand, arguing with a pitch lap and checking your work under a Ronchi tester, this mug was basically made for you. It's the kind of thing you put on your workbench and it just quietly makes sense to anyone else who's ever lost a Saturday to optical figuring.
The artwork shows two golden disc forms sitting on teal stone-textured bases, rendered in a dark navy setting with a three-quarter perspective that gives them real weight. Curved orange-brown stripes wrap across the face of each disc — if you know what Ronchi bands look like, you'll see them immediately. The whole thing has this ancient-artifact quality that somehow makes mirror blanks feel like they belong in a museum, which honestly isn't wrong.
It comes in an 11oz and a 15oz, so you can match it to whether you're a quick-espresso-before-collimation person or a two-hour-session-with-a-big-coffee person. Both sizes are dishwasher safe and microwave safe.
This one travels well as a gift for anyone deep in the amateur astronomy workshop rabbit hole — the kind of person who has opinions about cerium oxide and knows what a sagitta measurement is.
