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100 Meter OWL Telescope Project
mindpixel writes: "The European South Observatory (my employer) is getting VERY serious about building the OWL (OverWhelmingly Large) 100 meter telescope. Check out this new site dedicated to the project. You can see some cool diagrams of what the OWL telescope will look like and some simulated images here." For more about telescopes of unusual size, you might read McKinstry's interview last year.
For the same amount of money you can make awesome pictures of Africa without any national debts or children starving.
Really, the costs going to these space projects is just insane. Where are our priorities?
One thing which I've been wondering about VLT is the usage of just digital imaging (FORS1, etc)...or at least I haven't noticed any VLT cameras using traditional film (correct me if I'm wrong). I know that CCDs are great for making photometric measurements because of their linearity, but their resolution is nothing compared to large photographic plates used in older cameras. For example, FORS1 is just 2048x2048.
Well, ok, camera resolution might not be so important in most research, but I would imagine that doing the Palomar sky survey (hundreds of huge plates) with CCDs would be impossible (it would probably require trillions of pictures). ...And the best space poster pictures are still the ones taken with the Palomar 5m. ;-)
So, how are surveys made now or in future, with CCDs or plates? Are surveys or other hi-res imaging still relevant?
[I'm eagerly waiting for a job decision from ESO at Garching, should come next week. It would be great to get to mess up^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdevelop the computer systems there. ;-)]
Not quite solid, try made of hexagonal mirrors approx 2m across. It would be a huge pain in the ass to make a 100m diameter mirror, not to mention uneconomic. Thats why they plan to have it tiled. But all the tiles do make up the mirror for one large telescope. Cheers
Stars are so far away, they appear as point sources to us, eg. they have zero width (or, to be more precise, our viewing angle is zero). But when does a telescope that powerfull such that nearby stars aren't point sources anymore? If stars weren't as bright as they are, could this 100m telescope see planets orbiting Alpha Centauri, for example?
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Do these maniacs have any appreciation for how much Windex and how many paper towels they're talking about?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
On a more serious note, why are we still building telescopes on Earth with the limitations we face on the ground? (Atmospheric distortion comes to mind... And I do understand they'll probably build this thing in a remote area to avoid the obvious: smog, city lights, etc. Still, though, there are some inherent limitations that they give a telescope like this by building it on and designing it for Earth.)
Many ground-based telescopes are using "Adaptive Optics" systems, where an optic module tries to reverse the atmospheric distortion. They are already quite successful for very small fields-of-view, and a next generation of instruments are under development for bigger fields. The OWL would be practically useless without adaptive optics. I personally attended a talk by ESO's director, where he said that the success of the AO modules in the next years will be the deciding factor for the OWL.
More awesome pics from space... If anyone doesn't know about astronomy pic of the day over at nasa... I highly recommend you go looking through the archives. Some of the pics from hubble and others are so aweing. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Nope. Un uh, sorry, these bad boys are talking about one solid 100-meter MIRROR with a telescope assembly that would just fit under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and stand almost 3/4 as tall.
To put that in perspective, once the thing's built, you would have a good chance of seeing it on the horizon with your naked eye from 15-20 miles away (a rough guess, I know).
You know that gargantuan telescope Marvin the Martian had in the Bugs Bunny cartoons? The OWL makes it look like a Cracker Jack prize.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
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.
Everytime you read about the newest development in telecscope technology, it's given an outrageous name describing how large it is. I remember when the Very Large Telescope, or VLT, came about. Now we have OverWhelmingly Large? This is complete craziness. We've got Large, Very Large, OverWhelmingly Large, and the ultimate which will probably never be developed, My Penis!
For the price of one small space telescope (HST mirror is only 2.4m in diameter) you can build the largest earth-based telescopes ten times over (the ESO VLT, 4 8m telescopes working as an array will, when fully operational in 2003-2004 have cost maybe 1/5 of what Hubble has cost until now). Furthermore, in visible light, earth-based telescopes are already producing images as sharp as, and even sharper than Hubble. At the time the HST was conceived, Adaptive Optics, which can eliminate most atmospheric turbulence, was still a US Military classified technology). The only short-term reasons for building space telescopes are: 1) observing in wavelengths absorbed by our atmosphere (like much of the IR and UV spectrum) 2) Getting spectra of earth-like planets surrounding other stars, this would require a space-based interferometer, because the earth probably isn't a sufficiently stable base to do this type of observations...
There is no proof that alien do not exist, either. You can't prove a negative condition. Science and statistics. Gotta love it.
woof.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is using CCDs to map one quarter of the entire sky, in five passbands. Its main camera uses a mosaic of 30 2048x2048 CCDs to cover an area about 2.5 degrees across (although there are gaps between the chips). Other mosaic cameras have even more pixels.
Future ground-based surveys will use electronic detectors, not photographic plates. The increased sensitivity and linearity of electronic detectors, plus their inherent digital output, make them far superior to plates.
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What are the benefits of having an Earth-bound, optical telescope? Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?
If there are no advantages here, is it more cost-effective, or what?
Chris: What you should actually ask is what advantage does a space based telescope have over a ground based telescope? The only thing you gain from being in space for an optical telescope is better image quality due to lack of atmospheric turbulence. By for every other measure (maintenance, support, materials, etc.) being in space is much, much more expensive and limited. Which is why the Hubble and it's 2.4 meter primary cost a number of times more than the projected cost of of the 100 meter OWL. Recent advances in computer technology (adaptive and active optics) have greatly reduced the advantage that being in space provides at optical wavelengths. For some non-optical telescopes (x-ray, IR, gamma ray) there will always be an advantage to being in orbit.
Space based and ground based telescopes compliment each other. Right now, the Hubble's primary mission is that of a scout... it finds targets for the VLT (which I operate)... the Hubble's mirror is small and exposure times are limited by cosmic rays... the ground based VLT is much better at getting science data once the Hubble finds the target.
The next space telescope will be the NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope) which will be about the size of a single VLT telescope (we have 4 here in Chile) and it again will act as a scout for the OWL.
This universe is millions upon billions of light years across, and all they can do with this piece of expensive equipment is watch owls?
--
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You have to wonder what is on Michael's mind tonight with him posting stories about "overwhelmingly large" telescopes and "tech wars in meat space..."
On a more serious note, why are we still building telescopes on Earth with the limitations we face on the ground? (Atmospheric distortion comes to mind... And I do understand they'll probably build this thing in a remote area to avoid the obvious: smog, city lights, etc. Still, though, there are some inherent limitations that they give a telescope like this by building it on and designing it for Earth.)
It would seem much more logical to put this money toward a space based (a la Hubble, but much more advanced) telescope. (Yes, I know they're sometimes expensive and slow, but...) This way, it would seem, our returned photographs would be of optimal quality.
Just a thought.
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