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."

Comments

Re:More info and not everybody like this...

[erick99]

Here's some more about the Apache as well as some folks that are worried about wildlife. These days anything will draw a protest. It's the American way . . .

But not everyone is proud of the achievement. Controversy has swirled around plans for the Mount Graham International Observatory since it got its start 20 years ago atop the 10,700-foot mountain. Opponents contended the observatory would cause the demise of the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. And the San Carlos Apache Tribe said development would desecrate a sacred mountain. Environmentalists and members of the tribe filed some 40 lawsuits - eight of which ended up before a federal appeals court - but the University of Arizona prevailed. The telescope and mountain observatory, about 125 miles northeast of Tucson, also survived two major forest fires in eight years, the most recent one this summer. "It's a sad day for anyone who believes that the University of Arizona cares about ethics, biology, cultural protection and religious freedom," said longtime project foe Robin Silver, conservation chairman for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Re:Does this effectively obsolete Hubble?

[adminispheroid]

No. There is an unfortunate tendency to compare every telescope to Hubble, whether the comparison makes sense or not. Hubble has two major specialties, UV astronomy and high resolution, and a minor specialty, near IR astronomy. LBT will not compete in the UV department -- it can't be done through the atmosphere. It is quite possible that LBT will do better than Hubble at high-resolution IR work -- but that isn't the main thing Hubble does.

A requirement on all observing proposals to Hubble is that the observation can't be done by any ground based telescope. This is so we don't waste the expensive telescope time on something that can be done by the chearper telescopes. So when LBT starts operation, there may be some observations that would have been done on Hubble going to LBT instead. But certainly not all of them.

In any case, the way things are going at NASA HQ, it'll be lucky if Hubble is still operating by the time LBT starts observing with both mirrors.