In the following picture, if you look closely, you can see that 6 of the 12 squares on the perimeter of the dish have some red scribbles on them. Those are the ones that seem to have too much curvature causing the spot to be "smeared" away from the focus in the previous pictures.

By my count, of the 20 exposed squares on the dish, the central 8 are right on, as are 6 of the outer 12. The final 6 have too much curvature and don't contribute more than about 1/4 of their light to the center spot.

In the best case, I think I could get 1000 suns from this dish, using a target of about 6 cm^2. I doubt I could rely on more than 500x, though, on a regular basis. I'm just guessing at this point.


Tracking on a partly cloudy day was a little erratic -- the dish wants to "run home" to the parked position a lot. An improved algorithm might make a world of difference, even with no changes to the sun-finding scope.


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