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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.
> 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
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.
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
This stuff is even more complicated that you think. Hubble schedulers (and I have an old office mate who is one of these people) have all sorts of restrictions to obey. They can't look too close to the Earth, or sun, and can't look with some instruments during some phases of the orbit (e.g., flying over the South Atlantic Anomoly or SAA). On the other hand, there exist "Continuous Viewing Zones" near the poles for which Hubble can pretty much look at constantly throughout it's entire orbit, so their especially efficient.
Overall, Hubble is less restricted than any ground-based telescopes because it can look closer to the sun than any of them. We used to have all sorts of problems making quasi-simultaneous ground-based observations, because they would schedule Hubble observations a month later/earlier than we'd be able to see a target from our telescope in Texas. That atmospheric scattering hurts in more ways than one.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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)