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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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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)