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You should also mention ESO's VLTI here, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at Mt. Paranal, which is just taking its first shots...

At lot can show through a dust cloud at the right wavelengths, and you don't even have to go as far as radio astronomy to get some good detail of what's going on behind the scenes.

ESO (European Southern Observatory) shows the dark cloud Barnard 68 as it appears in various visible and infrared wavelengths here. It's quite striking how transparent the cloud becomes in the near-infrared.

This site describes the telescopes that comprise the interferometer used to make the observations:
http://www.eso.org/projects/vlti/

Quote:
The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) consists in the coherent combination of the four VLT Unit Telescopes and of several moveable 1.8m Auxiliary Telescopes. Once fully operational, the VLTI will provide both a high sensitivity as well as milli-arcsec angular resolution provided by baselines of up to 200m length.

More details at the press release:

http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2003/pr-1 4-03.html

Including more technical drawings.

-molo

This is what your eyes will look like if you watch the event through dark tinted glasses.

The transit is already over. Here is a direct link to the ESO site about it (with pictures). There's a Venus transit coming up next year, however, which is much rarer.

Dark Matter isn't the only explanation for Fritz Zwicky's 1993 observation.

MOND or Modified Newtonian Dynamics proposed by Moti Milgrom is I think better. If I were to bet on someone winning a future Nobel, Milgrom would be the person.

I'm driving the VLT as I type this...sentence was interrupted for a preset...I'm back now.

Anyway, I know a number of scientists that seriously consider the Newton's may not work at large scales. Nature recently rejected a paper from some rather prominent that seemed to confirm that gravity behaves differently at large scales. But, science is very reluctant to change its equations and publication will have to await more data.

Just remember - Dark matter may not exist. Be skeptical of those who treat it as fact.

MOND FAQ

Dark-Matter Heretic [This is a wonderful article]

and what iluminates it? It's bright enough to see with a telescope, but it's -272?

From the article:

"One can say the Boomerang acts as a refrigerator," said astronomer Lars-Ake Nyman, who measured its temperature using the European Southern Observatory radio telescope in Chile. He did this by comparing signals received from carbon monoxide in the nebula with signals from the background radiation.

So it was done with a radio telescope, possibly SEST, by looking at molecular lines from CO. It sounds like they found that the CO was absorbing some of the background radiation. So it wasn't "seen" with a telescope in the way that you're thinking.

Here are some places I want to visit:

THE AMERICAS:
1. The Inka trail in Peru ($300 for 2-day walk, must travel in a group) even includes a tunnel and ends at Machu Picchu. Numerous guides offer tours, just shop around in Cusco.
2. Yaxchilan Ruins on Usumacinta river in Mexico include ruins of possibly oldest bridge in North America. Great adventure to see. I was stopped by the army who sealed off the entire area. To be flooded by dam. link1, link2 to people who have been there
3. Mexico - their pyramids (Sun,Moon,Oaxaca) are built without knowledge of the wheel (even though their kids played with toy carts) and without horsepower.
4. ESO telescopes in Chile ESO visitor information - must register far in advance.
5. Hoover Dam, Golden Gate Bridge (US)

EUROPE:
1. Cloaka Maxima, Ancient Rome
2. Reconstruction of Frauenkirche, Dresden
3. World War II Bunkers and SS-20 silos (Bouda) in Czech Republic (Visitors only permitted May-August)
4. TGV trains in France
5. Ancient Mines (Cornwall and Sinai- Egypt

It isn't an 18 meter telescope. It is actually an array of four 8-meter telescopes. With three 1.8-meter telescopes for interferometry, and a 2.5-meter auxillary telescope. All of this should provide for relatively wide-field optical imaging.

Here is a great diagram and description of the VLT

As for being able to see the lander, it should be able to see objects of about 1.3 meters in diameter.
The supporting math:
(5e-5 m) / (1.6e4 m) * (3.85e8 m) = (1.2m)

Human hair: ~5 x 10^-5 meters
Maximim Distance human hair can be seen by telescope: 1.6 x 10^4m (according to story)
Distance to moon: 3.85 x 10^7m

Adaptive optics is also used in the VLT's on mount Paranal: http://www.eso.org/projects/aot/

A nice introduction into AO: http://www.eso.org/projects/aot/introduction.html

Adaptive optics is also used in the VLT's on mount Paranal: http://www.eso.org/projects/aot/

A nice introduction into AO: http://www.eso.org/projects/aot/introduction.html

Here's what I did...

Got on a plane and went to Chile where I knew they were building the largest optical telescope in the world. I then applied to become a telescope instruments operator... they gave me the job because I had 15 years of software development experience and I spoke fluent English (which is what they use at the observatory)...

Coincidently, my contract is up in June, and I'm not renewing because after six years in South America operating the telescope and writing, it's just time to come back... So, if you're a smart geek, you can have my job. Hell, you don't even have to wait until June as there is a position open now.

The article then claims that it occupies a volume of space about 3 times that of our solar system.

This might be a misinterpretation. In the ESO press release they say:

...the star approached the central Black Hole to within 17 light-hours - only three times the distance between the Sun and planet Pluto.

So that puts an upper limit on the scale of the thing, but doesn't imply it takes up all of that space.

Actually the background temperature of the universe is 2.7K (look here about a quarter of the way down).

The theory is that leftover radiation from the Big Bang makes the universe that temperature.

I know that they have optical telescopes that do this now. Keck Observatory come to mind. Here is a link to a page that describes what they are doing and the resolution they are getting. The VLT (Very Large Telescope) is another example of combining the beams of multiple telescopes.

Re:Verify?

The sharpest image ever taken of the moon from the Earth's surface "is 0.07 arcsec, or about 130 metres on the lunar surface (in the N-S direction). Elevation differences of a few tens of metres only are therefore visible by the shadows they cast. The VLT image represents what an astronaut (with normal eye acuity of 1 arcmin) would see from 400 km above the surface." (European Southern Observatory press release, August 9, 2002).

Ever heard of the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL)?

It's not going to be built by Americans...

" If they succeed the SKA will be so big and precise it will jump the world's current best, the American Very Large Array in New Mexico, by a factor of 100, both in sensitivity and resolution."

Fortunately it's only compared to the VLA in regards of resolution. Single radiotelescopes have no chance in hell to get to extreme resolutions. Resolution is all in the diameter, or baseline. Nothing you can do about, it's just basic physics. Fortunately you can have big holes in your telescope, or inversely just a few parts of the surface. Excactly the principle of the VLA and VLBI in radio frequencies and the VLTI for light. You can even find a simulation applet here

In fact the earth itself is getting too small to get more resolution. Going into space is indeed being looked into, but not in the sense of a satellite like the Hubble orbiting the earth. That would hardly be worth the effort where radio astronomy is concerned. Having a baseline as long as the distance between the earth and the moon, now that would be an improvement. Plus, if it's built on the side that's always turned away from the earth, the telescope will be shielded from all the annoying interference created by all the radiochatter on earth, while it's still possible to look at the same piece of sky as an earth based telescope.

In the visual spectrum, Darwin from ESA looks set to become the next record holder . A first technology demonstration/development flight in the form of SMART-2 is currently under development.

By linking multiple observatories, you can do neat tricks like interferometry. One advantage you get is that your effective mirror/antenna size becomes considerably larger than the little mirrors/antennae that make up the array -- it's a function of how far apart the antennae are rather than the size of the individual elements, which is why a few hundred yards of separation can make a huge difference. The VLT uses this idea, as does the VLBI. Holograms are related in the sense that they exploit phase information of light just as interferometers do.

I've seen this news story floating around for the past several days... sadly, nobody links back to the site with the original, high-resolution images (suitable for, say, printing out or making into a desktop background).

The originals can be found here.

http://www.eso.org/projects/owl/

Yay! Another huge telescope here in Chile! :D

Combining telescopes in the optical domain (frequency ~10^14 Hz) is only possible by correlating in the optical domain with an interferometer. This means you need optical delay-lines (VLTI) of maximum some hundred meters or fibers (OHANA) of maximum a few kilometers.

Actually, according to this there is only about 1 second of exposure and field of view of about a few micro-arcseconds so it will probably not be that big of a deal. Plus since it is going ot be based probably in Chile, are there a lot of plans flying over the Chilean Atacama Desert anyway?

I wonder what "light" the VLT will shead on this once the interferometer is fully operational.

Does anyone know? Can the VLT be used to gather this kind of data?

GRID Computing is the current sexy term in scientific computing, but its something that is so vague that it can mean all things to all people. Which is perhaps why its suddenly so popular, everyone can get their pet project funded.

To some people it means actualy hardware, routers, fibre, supercomputers, that sort of thing. Certainly in the UK and Europe this group consists mostly of Particle Physicists, see the GridPP Project Homepage for details of whats going on there...mostly the Particl Physicsts seem to have ridiclous amounts of data on their hands (Petabytes/day) that they have to ship. Fun stuff!

To the astronomical community it means software, virtual observatories, data mining and intelligent agents. In the UK and Europe have a look at the AstroGrid and the AVO projects. Although some of us are talking about hardware, the project I'm working on for instance, eSTAR, is putting robotically operated telescopes onto the GRID. However even here the main focus of the project is on the fun stuff we can do with the software, intelligent agents and data mining spring immediately to mind. In the US the NVO is the main focus of GRIDs for the astronomers there...

However here are the puppies you really want. Spectacular as a desktop.

Larger pics are available here. The largest is a 1951x2366-pixel JPEG. You'll have to crop some text off of the pic yourself to use it as a desktop, it appears.

Remember, Google is your friend.

Actually, I think ESO's is a clear winner.
Compare ESO's version (largest is 4.6MB JPEG @ 1951x2366)
and
any on Hubble's page (wide @ 800x813, closeup @ 1000x800).

NOAO has better images than Hubble's too, but they're also wide angle (but still really nice)...
Hubble's MPEG movie animation is very cool though.

is here: http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/phot -02-02.html

close... it's actually at http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/phot -02-02.html (no space in the uri). it sure does make for a good background at those higher resolutions though...as do a large archive that page points to: an "Astronomy Picture of the Day"

A very readable article, but I was surprised to see no other information on the referenced large telescopes. To save others from searching as I did, take a look at:

• VLT (Very Large Telescope)
  
• OWL (OverWhelmingly Large telescope)
  
• CELT (California Extremely Large Telescope)
  
• GSMT (Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope)
  

A very readable article, but I was surprised to see no other information on the referenced large telescopes. To save others from searching as I did, take a look at:

• VLT (Very Large Telescope)
  
• OWL (OverWhelmingly Large telescope)
  
• CELT (California Extremely Large Telescope)
  
• GSMT (Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope)
  

In any case, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, HST is quite old now, and past its initial proposed service lifetime, IIRC, so technology has come a long way since it went up. Second, things like this are often technologically lagging even before they go up, since it can take literally decades to plan an instrument of that size. Size is the other critical thing to keep in mind. It's (relatively) easy to build huge arrays like VLT on the ground, but try getting that into orbit :). Even if you break it up into many missions and assemble in-orbit (some early plans for NGST considered that, IIRC), it would still be a monumental task (though not impossible).

So I'd say in summary that chances are HST never could have been better than Paranal, even though it's been an awesome instrument throughout its lifetime.

Anyway, aparantly there is quite some contention between the groups working on the project about the results and the interpretation of them. Such a huge black hole would have destroyed any such feeder star in the nova that created the black hole. But there it is, a relatively small star feeding it's very heavy brother.

Try this link, it offers a bit more detail. Perhaps Walt can offer a bit more, he's better at explaining this stuff anyway.

Here's a link to the European Southern Observatory story that's not watered down (gotta love Reuters and AP like that!).

The Deep Ecliptic Survey by Millis et al is finding Kuiper Belt objects by the dozen.

Pluto is seen as a escaped moon of Neptune.

Evidence suggests that the Solar systyem underwent major changes about 65 million years ago. The dinosaurs seem to have been minor collateral damage.

Mars, for example, has a whole bunch of craters that cover just one side of the planet. The other half is pretty clean. Sounds like something went BOOM.

So oddities like asteroids orbiting pluto etc are par for the course.

What I find interesting is that The observations were carried out at the European Southern Observatory with the world's first operational "virtual telescope", Astrovirtel.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
is a news site based on Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -

Hubble was foobared when it was put into space. Nasa has spent how much fixing it? It's time to retire it and move on. Save our tax dollars for some really cool telescopes like the OWL and NGST

You are wrong. See here: http://www.eso.org/projects/owl/publications/2000_ 05_Messenger.htm

The text:
ESO is developing a concept of ground-based, 100-m class optical telescope (which we have christened OWL for its keen night vision and for OverWhelmingly Large), with segmented primary and secondary mirrors, integrated active optics and multi-conjugate adaptive optics capabilities. The idea of a 100-m class telescope originated in 1997, when it was assessed that true progress in science performance after HST and the 8-10-m class Keck and VLT generations would require an order of magnitude increase in aperture size (a similar assessment had been made by Matt Mountain in 19961). The challenge and the science potential seemed formidable -and highly stimulating.

I've recently seen a TV program about the building of the VLT. It showed the conception and the technical implications of the telescope. At one point they spoke of a device in charge of monitoring and correcting atmospheric optical aberrations, in real time.
With this correction the telescope is providing hyper clear pictures of the sky.

I've searched the ESO site and found a reference to this device on this page (scroll down to "Active Optics").

Besides, given the limitation of the size of objects that can launched in space, a telescope based on earth, big enough and judiciously placed, and equiped with this device, will always achieve better results than a space's one.

Yes, but it would be unbelieveably difficult. Ground telescopes that use so called aperture synthesis can achieve resolutions which approximate the resolution you would expect if you had one huge telescope the size of the separation distance or "baseline" of the two smaller separated telescopes(the basic idea of astronomical interferometery), but there is a (BIG)catch. In order to 'get fringes' or achieve interferometry, you must combine the light from the array of telescopes with the same high tolerances that you would need to use with one giant telescope the size of the baseline. That means the mirrors and beam splitters/combiners of the entire system must be held to within 1/10th of a fraction of the wavelength of light that you are observing with. If you assume yellow light with a wavelength of 5X10^-7 meters you would have to know the positions of the optics in the system to within 50 Nanometers or billionths of a meter. This is possible on earth and is even being done on large scales such as at Keck and the ESO's VLT. If you can figure out a way for two telescopes orbiting the earth 200Km up(and varying in altitude by METERS everyday because of drag with the upper atmosphere) to know their position with respecto to eachother to within a tiny fraction of the diameter of a hair, let me know; the King of Sweden wants to see you. (BTW this trick is not so hard at centemeter wavelenghts; the baseline of this system stretches from Hawaii to New Hampshire and the resolution in this VLBA image is nearly 1000 times higher than the hubble space telescope can achieve.)

The test is known as the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory).Developed as a specialized psychological test for the measurement of psychopathology, the MMPI has been the preferred psychosocial diagnostic instrument among clinicians for the past 50 years.

Originally published in 1940 by Hathaway and McKinley, MMPI has been implemented in many clinical and non-clinical contexts, including medical, educational, medicolegal and organizational settings. A restandardisation and partial revision of the MMPI resulted in the publication of the MMPI-2 in 1989.

GAC (Generic Artificial Consciousness -- pronounced "Jack") is the artificial personality being developed at the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project with the collaboration of nearly 40,000 Internet users from more than 200 countries worldwide.

GAC will be evaluated using the MMPI-2 over the next several months to assess its learning of human consensus experience from the Mindpixel project's large and diverse group of users from many different cultures.

The test will be supervised and interpreted by Dr. Robert Epstein, one of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior.

"Nothing like this has ever been attempted," said Epstein. "We're evaluating thousands of people worldwide as if they were one collective individual."

"We don't know if it is possible to build a normal personality out of millions of little pieces. This experiment will tell us how reasonable the idea is," Epstein added.

In the nearly one year the project has been online, Mindpixel's Internet contributors have made nearly 8 million individual measurements of more than 355,000 individual items of human consensus experience.

The project's organizers hope that they will gain enough information by the time the project's data collection phase is complete (2010) to build a highly accurate statistical model of an average human mind which they hope can be used as a foundation for true artificial consciousness.

One of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior, Robert Epstein received his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University in 1981. He is Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today magazine and University Research Professor at United States International University in San Diego.

He is also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University. He was also the former director of the famed Loebner Prize competition in Artificial Intelligence.

The Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project was launched on July 6, 2000. It is the world's largest Artificial Intelligence effort, with nearly 40,000 contributing members in more than 200 countries.

[Contact: Dr. Robert Epstein, Christopher McKinstry]

02-Jul-2001

Gemini will not be an interferometer. For interferometry, you have to know the distance between the telescopes to an accuracy smaller than the wavelength used. Another thing is that you should either combine the beams from both telescopes, or get the phase information of each photon. In radio, it is possible to get the phase information. In optical, Keck and VLT can combine the beams. For Gemini, this would need quite a lot of optical fiber ;) The main goal of Gemini is to have identical state-of-the-art systems for observing both northern and southern sky.

IMHO X-ray astronomy is much more interesting, but I fear it will take some time before we get the X-ray interferometer, but I have heard some rumours on it.

I would be extremely surprised if Gemini could be used for optical interferometry, the purpose seems to be more to have complete coverage of the sky. For a start not much of the sky can be observed with both telescopes at once, and also you can't just take two pictures and then combine them. (Well you can, and it'll give you more intensity and slightly more contrast, but no more so than a longer exposure time, there will be no increase in resolution)

This might work with radiowaves as they are long enough to record the phase at both places and then combine them later, but i'd be impressed if they did that at visible wavelengths :). As far as I'm aware the interference is still done optically, thus requiring some proximity between the two parts of the interferometer.

Then again, I don't really have a clue about astrophysics, so i'll just shut up now...

But the next leap forward is going to be European... ESO (European Southern Observatory) are constructing two identical telescopes in Chile and Hawaii (project Gemini.) How's that for a long baseline? ;p

And for bluesky "gee whizz" quotient, check out the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL)...

I've seen a chart somewhere (can't find a link - anyone?) charting aperture (light collecting capacity) of telescopes since Galileo. The Keck and other 10m class telescopes have moved the curve from a nice straight line to an exponetial curve - and that's not allowing for vastly increased computer power, active optics, and out-of-visible band stuff. Truly this is a fantastic time to be interested in astronomy, even (especially?) as an amateur. For a couple of thousand dollars you can do stuff in your yard that was the province of professionals only a few decades ago.
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles

...only one baseline. The visibility of their interferometric signal is limited, they are only sensitive to certain spatial frequencies.

Damn, we need an array of these things. O wait, VLTI.

ESO has also issued a press release on this topic, which IMHO is better than the NASA press release (more facts, less marketspeak).