Gemini's Twin Lights Up in Chile

pyrrho writes: "The southern twin Gemini Observatory in Chile, Gemini South, was dedicated today. This is an exact duplicate of the Gemini North Observatory which recently directly imaged a brown dwarf. These Observatories not only bring in a new era of amazing astronomy, including the possibility of direct imaging of planets, but also represent a step forward in the automation of observatories, being highly remote controllable from around the world if desired, and also highly automated, supporting observation queuing that helps to match particular observations to the best fit seeing conditions. Gemini is an international project, bringing together an unprecidented number of nations for joint research in astronomy. By supplying identical observatories in both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, Gemini Observatory truly ushers in an era of big telescopes."

Comments

What an Excellent Idea

[alfredw]

Putting identical telescopes in both hemispheres is an excellent step for science - this will allow quality observations to be made over the entire sky.

The next logical step would be to build 3 or 4 identical scopes in each hemisphere. This would let you observe an object 24hrs a day (with a redundant observatory, perhaps, in case of clouds).

Anyway, all in all, it's very exciting work!

Re:What an Excellent Idea

[pepik_knize]

The next logical step would be to build 3 or 4 identical scopes in each hemisphere. This would let you observe an object 24hrs a day (with a redundant observatory, perhaps, in case of clouds). The Whole Earth Telescope (WET) does just this to study asteroseismology with ~10 telescopes. Read about it here. (They also use a pretty cool metacomputing Linux system for data analysis. The other really cool thing about this group is that all their data is "open-sourced", i.e., publicly available to anyone that wants it, immediately.