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Canadians Plan to Build World's Biggest Telescope
Jerry Rivers writes "If all goes according to plan, Canada will be home to the world's largest telescope.
The international project, which has the support of the U.S. Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, is still in the funding stages but when finished it will be roughly the size of a football field.
Maybe with this they'll finally find the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."
"It's got to be a site that's meaningful from an astrological point of view, but we don't want it to be in place that's so hostile that scientists and people won't go there," Halliday said. of course he (probably) said astrophysical
Maybe they could shelter it inside a building called an observatory?
The telescope refered to in this article is to be the world's largest *optical* telescope. The world's largest telescope will continue to be the Arecibo radio telescope.
It doesn't say where they're going to put it. Parts of southern British Columbia don't get much snow. The Okanagan, for example, has a Mediterranean climate. Lots of fruit is grown there, including grapes that support a burgeoning wine industry.
A CFL field is 110 yards between the goal lines, and each endzone is 25 yards deep if I recall correctly. http://www.cfl.ca/
:-)
Rules are listed at that site anyway.
Way to be ambiguous Sumitter. Don't you know that Slashdot standard sizes only come in "Libraries of Congress" for data, and "VW Bugs" for things that come from, or go up into space?
Our balls are bigger*. Now our telescopes are too
*Actual official CFL t-shirt slogan.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The telescope will be made of many (thousands) small mirrors each of which have to be controlled with an accuracy of approx. 1/14000 the thickness of a human hair. (According to interview on CBC Radio One aired earlier today.) The Canadian contribution will be the support structure (with required accuracy as stated above.) Who is doing the optics hasn't been decided yet.
It's just a euphimism, all of big science is done this way. There is no one country that is willing to pour so much much money into a single pure research project. Ever hear of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)? It was going to cost the U.S. almost $10 billion. Congress canned it after ~$2 billion was spent. Suddenly, CERN became a big deal again and much of the US HEP research and funding went to an international project. Even though the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being built at CERN is in Switzerland and France, most of the heavy construction is being done by lowest bidder contractors from Russia and Poland. I spent three summers there, and this is overwhelmingly the case. It's the EU after all.
The primary mirror will be able to alter its shape to compensate for deformation due to gravity at various elevations etc. That's "active optics" and you're right - that's no small challenge.
:)
However the biggest outstanding problem is over coming turbulence in the atmosphere. That's Adaptive Optics and a hot research topic at the moment. Any telescope bigger than about 300mm isn't diffraction limited. It's limited by the atmosphere (Fried's coherence length aka r0).
There are some nasty requirements for AO. The detection of wavefront deformation and correction are huge engineering challenges. Most of the AO system deformable mirrors sit behind the secondary mirror although there's a fair bit of effort going into deformable secondaries atm eg. MMT and LBT. It costs big bucks for that kind of development and there are a *lot* of AO systems gathering dust because they were sooo expensive to keep tweaking with.
If I had the purse strings I'd want to see their AO design before they got a penny.
Still... good luck to 'em
Cheers
Stevo
Forget the truth. Science is fact.
As of a year or so ago, no kidding, they're building the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (official name).
So what name does this one get?
The Staggeringly Large Telescope? Not as big as "overwhelming".
Oh, but it shouldn't be as big as overwhelming - the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, after all, would have a diameter of 100m(!!!), and more surface area than all previous professional telescope mirrors put together. At $1.2 trillion, a bargain, compared to $750 million for the 30m Canadian telescope. Hell, the secondary mirror alone for the OLT would be almost as big as this Canadian telescope.
"Powerful" is an odd term in this case. Being an amatuer astronomer the main thing a large mirror gets you is light gathering ability. A 30 meter lens, has 9x the surface area of a 10 meter lens (the current largest optical telescope), so it can gather 9x more light.
A ground based scope will have problems with the atmospheric turbulance. If you're not an amatuer astronomer you'll be hard pressed to believe how bad this can be, but in principle, it's like looking up at the sky through the bottom of a swimming pool... sure the water is "clear" but those ripples on the surface sure do mess with your ability to see clearly.
This is not a problem when viewing large objects (did you know the Andromeda galaxy is 4x the size of the full moon?) but for smaller objects like planets... it's pretty bad.
Fortunately there's a technique called "adaptive optics" which can help.
But this is getting long winded as it is... my guess is that this scope will be used for looking at VERY dim and moderately large objects.
The telescope would be built by a coalition of 15 Canadian universities and the engineering firm AMEC, the same company that built the keck telescope. Nowhere does it say that it will be installed in Canada. In fact the expectation is either Chile or Hawaii.
Actually, the Resturant at the End of the Universe could exist anywhere, even on planet Earth, as the "End" is representive of the universe ending (in another big bang) and not representing the "edge" of the universe as was given in the end of the HHGG movie.
In fact, I might open a resturant at the end of the universe here and have a grand opening, well, uh, soon... maybe. Be there, or be blown up.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
While I'm sure other countries will get in on a project of this magnitude, I think both the /. summary and the original article in the Toronto Star are incorrect, I've never heard of a U.S. Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, and I would be very surprised if one existed, since Gerard Herzberg was a Nobel Prize (chemistry) winning Canadian scientist. Not only there, there is already a National Research Council of Canada Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics in Victoria. A quick google search also didn't show any "U.S. Herzberg Institute".
Shame on The Star.
Are you BioCurious?
"It's got to be a site that's meaningful from an astrological point of view, but we don't want it to be in place that's so hostile that scientists and people won't go there," Halliday said.
1. I sure hope you said astronomical, rather than astrological, or the astronomers will shoot you when they find out.
2. Places that are hostile to people are ideal for telescopes. Keck for instance, is at nearly 14,000 feet above sea level. If you want to breathe, generally you do it from a tank. The less air you have between you and the stars the better. As well, it's absolutely imperative that they operate well away from civilization because light pollution destroys the view. And finally, there's this little thing called automation. You don't really *have* to be there to take pictures anymore. The best visual telescope in the world is the one in the most hostile environment of all: in orbit. The only possible way to make it work is by automation.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Then you must mean *latitude*. While latitude does matter, it's probably more important that you have good views of the southern sky. Lots of interesting astronomy to be done there. You can't see into the galactic center from far northern latitudes.
You also care about percent cloudcover, and having nice laminar windflows to improve the image stability. Both of these are arguments against high latitudes. AFAIK, the only telescope places at a polar station was an IR scope at or near the S. Pole to take advantage of extreme aridity. I don't know if it's still in operation.
There are good dark sky sites in Chile, Hawaii, etc., which are already hosts for other large installations. The odds of this thing being built in Canada are zero. Which sucks in a way--I'll never get to go play tourist.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Response A: It's clearly established that the Restaurant will be located in the ruins of Magrathea, not "anywhere".
Response B: The prepositional phrase "at the end" is a play on words, and the joke is that it can be interpretted in spatial or temporal terms, which is what makes it funny. Confining it to only one sense of the phrase robs it of its humor.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
There are now techniques that correct for the earth's atmospheric distortion which enable earth-based telescopes to be much better than the Hubble.
Not true! I've seen several people saying this on this forum, and it is false. Particuarly in the visual bands (i.e. B, V, and R), nothing approches Hubble's angular resolution. With no effort, Hubble can give you images with resolution of 0.05 arcseconds. With _a lot_ of work, V-band imaging from the ground can start to approach 0.2 arcseconds, for example (and it's worse for B). But only the best technology can do this at this point, and adaptive optics is _very_ expensive as far as time, and you often sacrifice some throughput as well.
As far as absolute collection of light, the ground-based, big telescopes are going to beat Hubble. However, as far as angular resolution, HST is still king. Adaptive/active optics is starting to pay big rewards in the IR, but it's not able to get anywhere near HST in the visual bands.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT, or whatever it's being called this week) is an incredible advancement, but we still need an optical telescope in space to do all of the interesting work that we'd like to do.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
It's called a mirror. A mir-ror. Possibly something unfamiliar to many on Slashdot.
... and then they built the supercollider.
"Although a site for the telescope has not been selected, it is hoped that preconstruction would likely begin in 2008 so that it would become operational by 2015. The plans were unveiled in Vancouver, Canada, where AMEC engineers have been working on the project."
The title of this post is totaly off base. This project has very little to do with Canada. It is primarily a collaboration between CalTech and the University of California. The plans for this have been in the works for almost a decade already, so this really isn't huge news.
I worked on an atmospheric sensing project a few months back that was loosely associated with the Thirty meter telescope through the Center for adaptive optics at UC Santa Cruz. One of postdocs from Caltech that was working with us disappeared for a few months to scout a location for this thing. Apparently they want to build it in the high deserts of South America; the reasons being the lack of rain, less atmosphere to look through, and virtually no light pollution. Keck, the huge pair of telescopes in Hawaii can only operate about half the time because of bad weather.
Fun telescope fact: Without adaptive optics (the thousands of tiny actuators behind the mirrors in big telescopes) no matter how big your lens, you will have the same effective resolution as a 10 inch telescope. This is because the air between the scope and the stars is constantly shifting. It is also why the Hubble can take super clear images despite its small size.