Giant Telescopes Of The Future

mindpixel writes: "Mindjack just published my article about the the future of very large telescopes, such as the VLT and the OWL which I talked about in my /. interview. In addition, I talk about a future space-based telescope that would use the Sun's gravity to 'image large surface features,' of extrasolar planets, which telescpes like the VLT can just detect, 'such as oceans, continents or ice caps, or even the impact of civilization on such features.'"

Comments

Not to mention the Square Kilometer Array ...

[LL]

... which is being proposed for outback Australia. According to some of the designs, a log-spiral configuration could extend more than 2000 kilometres (!!) which pretty much spans the whole continent. About 40% of the lens will be concentrated in a single kilometre grid. The interesting feature is that they hope this will be a software telescope with insane amounts of DSPs to help correlate the different frequency radio signals and generate composite snapshots. Browse around that site for some interesting reads!

LL

Make Your Own Telescope

[goingware]

While the telescopes described here are beyond the reach of the amateur, it is possible for you to make your own high-quality telescope to enjoy and photograph astronomical sights. I am an amateur telescope maker and I am making an eight-inch Ritchey Chretien reflector.

You can get books telling how to make telescopes from Willman-Bell and ask for help on the Amateur Telescope Maker's mailing list. Dan Cassaro can sell you a reasonably priced mirror grinding kit.

You can find many products for amateur astronomers at the Astronomy Mall.

Clear Skies!

atmospheric distortion

[raygundan]

Has already become a factor in how big telescopes can be on earth. But, it's already been "fixed", too. The new giant scopes use adaptive optics that actually compensate for atmospheric distortion in realtime.

To me, that is simply amazing. Adjusting 1600 mirrors realtime to correct tiny air currents!