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Telescope Will Have Images 10X Sharper Than Hubble
jangobongo writes "After a 20 year struggle, the University of Arizona's $120 million Large Binocular Telescope was dedicated last week. This unique telescope will have twin 8.4-meter (27.6 foot) mirrors that sit on a single mount. Using methods similar to a medical CAT scan, a technique of "tomographic" image reconstruction will be used to produce pictures 10 times sharper (example) than the Hubble Space Telescope for a fraction of its $2 billion dollar cost."
I don't really think it's fair to compare this with the hubble, unless this telescope can orbit earth.
*cough*$10 billion*cough*
As amazing as Hubble has been, I fail to see how dumping huge sums of money into keeping it going is worth it if we can dump similar sums of money into earth-based technology with better results.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I would think the Apache people would welcome this contribution to mankind by having this telescope on their sacrd mountain.
It seems rather poetic in my opinion - this mountain is used to peer into the heavens, where their ancestors used to commune and/or communicate with the heavens. (I'm not up on Apache religion, enlighten me if I'm way off.)
I'm assuming they aren't levelling the whole thing and putting a McDonalds up there or something like this. The objection to the use of the name Columbus sounds as if some are being a bit touchy about this, but for the wrong reasons.
> This isn't intended to be a troll, but I just don't get space exploration. I mean, there are a lot of good causes that all these dollars could be going to right here on Earth: stopping wars, battling diseases, increasing literacy, fighting pollution.
Better yet, why not use the money we spend on wars for all that good stuff, and maybe we'll have enough left to do some space exploration anyway.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think the parent also means that we can't see things below a certain plane no matter what, mostly due to the fact that the telescope is stationarily located in the northern hemisphere. So this telescope can never be used to examine features in the southern sky.
Actually I think you are missing something... NASA was is space in the 60's. Private enterprise only made it in '04 because someone was willing to throw a lot of money at a prize. In fact NASA works with private enterprise on almost everything it does,,, it just happens to be very expensive doing it first.
BEside the fact that it's a state university, This proves nothing. Hubble was built years ago. How much would it have cost to build this telescope when Hubble was built? I don't think it was even possible then.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First, all "these dollars" are spent right here on earth anyway. The idea that somehow or other money spent on research for space or technology is gone when the space craft is launched seems to be a common fallacy. It is also a faovorite that is often promulgated by parties with an interest in keeping frontiers closed and humanity in bulk pig-ignorant (religious zealots, some political parties, etc.).
Second, I doubt that any amount of spending will "stop" a war. Wars are inherently economic at root. A Cheney or a bin Laden or a Bush, a Haliburton or an Enron is always, always in the background with an "interest" in the objective of any conflict. Ideals and religious rationalizations are used by all sides in a war, but curiously, neither the idealists nor the religious seem to supply more than cannon fodder. The commonest example of this these days are the leaders of Muslim terrortist groups. You don't see THEM with a pound of semtex strapped to their bodies, or out taking lessons in crashing airliners. Nope, its some poor sap with a burning desire to purify the land for his religion or to get even for a real or imagined harm done by some equyally misguided zealot on the other side. What would stop wars is for the "followers" to hand their leaders the bag and say, "O.K. boss, your turn."
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
The radius of the earth is about 6400 km, and hubble only orbits about about 570 km above that. If you do the trig, hubble only has a 225 deg feild of view at any one time compared to 180 on the earth (disregarding the atmosphere in both cases).
Furthermore, both hubble and an earth bound telescop would have a somewhat limited view due to their "orbit". Concider a telescope on the equator. It would have a 180 degree field of view at any given time, and over the course of a day, everything would be in it's field of view except a cylinder the width of the earth, centering around the earths rotational axis, and extending to infinity in either direction. If you have telescope further north, it's daily field of view would have a cone shaped blind spot to the south. Hubbles orbital blind spot would be nearly non-existant over its orbit period, slightly better than the observatory at the equator, but that is easily solved by having two observatories - one in each hemisphere.
Concidering how inexpensive these are to build relative to a space based telescope, there is no reason why we can't do this. In fact we have hundreds of observatories across the world, each new or improved one slightly better than the one befores, but only one space based telescope. Improvements in ground telescopes will also be available to many more researchers, than with just one expensive space telescope.
Years ago, people did not "get" technologies like the computer. I mean, what good was an unreliable, hugely expensive machine that took up a rather large room? Who would want buy one, and for what purpose could they use it for? But look at where we are now, some 60 years after the first computer. Even if you can't think of any good that will come out of space exploration, just remember you do things everyday with computers that no one even imagined 50 years ago in their wildest dreams.
other people have commented that you get to see more than that due to rotation of the earth during the night, and movement of th eearth around the sun during the year.
however, there's a more fundamental reason why this is largely unimportant - the universe doesn't have a special direction, it's pretty much the same everywhere. so while you might not be able to see a certain object from a certain telescope, you can see another one pretty much like it.
there are exceptions, of course. if you're looking at objects in our galaxy then you may need to use a certain telescope, because the position of the galaxy relative to the earth is pretty much fixed. so for "nearby" objects it may be important. also, at the extreme opposite, observations of large scale fluctations in the very early universe (effectively observing *very* distance objects) may require all-sky observations.
but for many interesting objects - other galaxies, quasars, radio galaxies, etc there's no real loss to being restricted to one particular direction.
http://www.acooke.org
Meh. We spent $80 billion to go kill people (erm, I mean get oil. oh I mean liberate the people! that's it!) in Iraq... what's $10 billion to help people understand the Universe?
:-]
With politicians running the government we're all fucked
My other car is first.
In other news, computers are cheaper and more powerful today than they were 20 years ago!
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
While this telescope may have even better resolution power than Hubble, there's another major problem with all ground-based telescopes
They cannot detect EM waves that's not either visible light or in the radio wave to the far infrared range
This is because Earth's atmosphere, contrary to what most people would believe, is not transparent to EM waves of all wavelengths. For example, common sense tells us that it blocks almost all extreme UV light. So if you want to observe an object that emits only extreme UV light with a ground-based telescope, you're not gonna see it.
Another example would be gamma ray bursters. Remember these objects weren't detected until the US sent survillence satellites into space? This is because there's no way you can detect gamma rays that originated from space inside the atmosphere. Granted it's now possible to observe the after-glow of GRBs with ground-based telescopes, GRBs must still be detected from space telescopes beforehand.
Wow. This discussion is really disgusting. Sure am glad the old days of science married to racism have passed...
I am only an ameteur astronomer but wouldn't a more valid comparison be to (the slightly lesser known) Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea? For those of you who are not familiar there are twin 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, which I'd be willing to be has infinitely better seeing (read: atmospheric conditions; the light is distorted less) than New Mexico.
In addition, one can add instrumentation and the like to ground based telescopes and not really to space based onces - hence, Keck would be a much better comparison.
Finally, I don't understand why such a big deal is made of the implied revolutionary methods that are used to combine the images from each scope. If anyone knows, is this different from any other dual telescope setup?
For visible wavelengths the ground base telescopes can surpass Hubble. But no amount of adaptive optics can counter the atmospheric absorbtion of UV and the water absorbtion bands in the near and mid wave IR. Ground base telescopes are completely blind in these bands. In addition, a properly designed space telescope would be immune from the earth's visible and IR glow, which ultimately sets the lower limit on sensitivity. It has taken 20 years for ground base scopes to rival the capability of Hubble, a new space telescope would leave all of the ground based observatories in the dust.
Every space-exploration article draws this kind of post that says, "but we have more important problems here on Earth we should spend the money on."
And would spending the money spent on space actually fix these problems? No. There's enough food in the world, to take one problem, but other issues (politics) interfere with distribution.
This criticism can be reduced to the absurd very easily. In the most extreme case, should we identify the "top priority problem" and spend 100% of our resources to fix it? And then move down some list?
Of course not. That notion is absurd.
The case for space expoloration is exactly the case as for basic research of any kind. You never know what you will discover or its importance until you do it, and supporting basic capability in science and technology is always a good idea for a society. It pays off economically in lots of ways, so it doesn't even cost what it looks like on paper.
Personally, I find it gratifying to live in a culture that values studying the universe and understanding our place within it. That says something noble about humans in a world that is too often filled with the mundane and the tragic.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Intrinsic redshifts explain the anomalous association of high-redshift QSOs with galaxies of much lower redshifts. Space expansion was demonstrated pretty conclusively by observations a few years ago IIRC - QSS theory doesn't have a problem with this. However, Occam's razor would like to talk to the practice of putting QSOs at cosmological distances when they have been demonstrated by Arp to be associated with galaxies of much, much lower redshifts.
It always amazes me that otherwise sound scientists start talking about 'belief' whenever certain concepts are mentioned (eg. evolution and big bang theory). There is no need to believe in anything - you can just take a through a telescope (or microscope) and have a look.
The real bugger is that when you let intrinsic redshifts out of the bag (ie. that you could be observing them as a phenomenon, not on the basis of a theoretical model), several popular cosmological ideas lose a lot of credibility. Fortunately, the increasing accuracy of observational evidence will inevitably revise currently accepted models.
And we get to piss off an entire nation at once by using WMD's against them! Spectacular! Oooh, and we get to force our way of life on them, and our culture, all while sucking the lifeblood out of their country. *bats eyelashes* Isn't America great?
I am a nihilist and while I agree with you that nothing is inherently "sacred", when I enforce that view of mine upon other people who are minding their business and didn't ask for it, I become... AN ASSHOLE.
"Yes, I think that scientific progress should not be held back - at any cost. I think that nothing is sacred in the light of science - so long as it's justifiable."
Huh? You have a contradiction right there. "Science should not be held back at any cost" and "as long as it's justifiable". So what is it? Science at any cost, or only science if it is justifiable? In fact, why don't you go ahead and replace "science" with some other word like, oh, "religion". You know, it makes you sort of look like the religious zealots that you would presumably oppose.
"Outright opposition is silly. If they'd helped, they could probably have even had a say in what happened."
Wow, you're right. If you rape and kill my family and then want to build something on my house, I guess it's better if I work with you not against you. Now you don't have to agree with the perception in that sentence, you just have to UNDERSTAND it.
"The only danger mankind has is that we'll never learn the secrets of the universe"
And this is where the luxury of your callous smugness is revealed. You have to be really out of touch to think that the only "danger" to mankind is not knowing "secrets of the universe". I'll tell you what dangers to mankind are: overpopulation, starvation, genocide, mass health and disease epidemics, and last but not least the pandora's box of atrocities that are opened by people who practice "my belief at any cost" and "my belief is always right". I don't know your personal history, and I would in fact be more inclined to be empathetic if in fact you were merely a disgruntled and bitter curmudgeon like myself, but I will take a wild guess that maybe you should take your fancy panties to some place (assuming you voiced your opinion on this because you are USian, for that matter, there is plenty of poverty here too) to see some real povery and disease and violence: some REAL "danger". Not "learning the secrets of the universe" is totally fucking NOT a danger. It's the luxury of a rich bored man.
You see, I was like you too. Look at me, I'm a rationalist, I'm a nihilist, I don't "believe" in anything because I have facts! I am detached from pedestrian philosophical and religious fashion. I'm like a fucking robot! I'm enlightened!
Until I realized of course that that very same strident rationalism was itself a fashion, was itself a belief (go ask Godel). Now I'm still the same person, but I'm not an ASSHOLE about it.
"field of study and advancement"
The flaw is that you drank the koolaid (who gave you that koolaid? good time for self examination here) that said science for science sake is always "advancement". Science is advancement as long as it is doing a net good not bad in service of humanity. But there are other "advancements", like justice and freedom and eradicating povery and disease, etc.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?