Lunt Solar owner stares into the sun all day long

By Joe Pangburn, Inside Tucson Business
Published on Friday, January 08, 2010

Of all the beauty in nature that people take notice of in a day, the largest thing in our solar system may be the most ignored: the sun.

Mothers have always warned their children not to look directly into the sun – and for good reason. In all of its massive power and size the light given off by the huge burning ball of gas is enough to cause serious eye damage.

For those who don’t want listen to their moms’ advice, Lunt Solar Systems is happy to oblige.

"Dad was starting up another company making filters to be able to look at the sun and my thought was, ‘who is going to want to look at the sun?’" said Andrew Lunt, founder of Lunt Solar Systems. They sold that original business and two years ago started building solar telescopes. "Now we are so backed up with orders it will take six months or more to get it if you bought one from us today."

The distribution for his solar telescopes is worldwide with dealers in more than 30 countries. Within the last two months they were recognized with a Best of What’s New 2009 award from Popular Science magazine as well as by Sky and Telescope magazine with a Hot Product of 2010 award.

"We weren’t as surprised by Sky and Telescope, because that’s what we do," Lunt said. "But Popular Science was completely out of the blue and it’s just a thrill to be in there."

Lunt said he couldn’t have started the company at a better time in January 2008 at the solar minimum – the period with the least amount of solar activity.

"So many people wondered why I would start this now," he said. "But I needed that time to get things going and off the ground. Besides, now we’re two years into this cycle and there will be more excitement as we near solar maximum in around four years."

What makes watching the sun so much more entertaining, at least for Lunt, is that the night sky – for the amateur astronomer – will never change in their lifetime. That light takes thousands of years to reach earth. The sun however is constantly moving and changing and the light from the sun reaches the earth in around eight minutes.

"You can look in the telescope and not see a whole lot, come back in a half an hour and see a large solar flare that wasn’t there before," he said.

Lunt said it is also enjoyable to be able to see sun flares and sun spots and later see the effects of them such as Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights which are most common during the peak sunspot cycle.

The telescopes run from $500 up to a couple grand. Lunt personally inspects each one before it is sent out the door.

"When you’re paying that much for something, you don’t want to get it and have an issue with it right out of the box," he said. "I make sure it works perfectly before it is sent out to the customer."

And if there is a problem, it can get fixed right away. The company machines all the parts for the body of the telescopes, grinds and polishes the glass and assembles everything on site.

"Part of having a presence all over the world is knowing where to source products from around the world," he said. "We may buy focusers from this country and another part from that country. The glass we buy from New York. You have to do that to be able to compete these days."

The glass polishing machines run 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

"If you were to turn them off, it would take 48 hours for them to get back to the level they need to be at for our specifications," Lunt said. "So it is just better to keep them running."

It can take five to seven days to prepare one piece of glass to the specifications necessary to be installed in a telescope. There are also 17 filters within each telescope, several of which are redundant safeties should one filter fail.

One key ingredient necessary to be able to keep products moving out the door is a large number of days of sunshine to be able to test the telescopes and keep the process rolling.

"That’s why we’re in Tucson," Lunt said. "Phoenix has a lot of sun too, but Phoenix is too hazy and it’s harder to get a consistently good look at the sun to test these telescopes than it is here in Tucson."

Biz Facts

2520 N. Coyote Drive, Suite 111

Lunt Solar Systems

www.luntsolarsystems.com/

(520) 344-7348

Contact reporter Joe Pangburn at jpangburn@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4259.