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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."
$750 million 10 years to build! This better have some hi-def images of little green men at the end of it
Not quite done by Canadians then. Especially if it's getting funding from a US company...
Death by snoo-snoo!
Maybe with this they'll finally find the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Silly editors...by the time the light from the end of the universe gets here, Earth will have been destroyed by the Vogons.
Oh, and when it happens, let me be the first to say:
DUPE!
Say, if Americans were going to build the world's biggest telescope, the title would not read "Americans Plan to Build World's Biggest Telescope", it would read "World's Biggest Telescope to be Built".
Why pick out the country that built it?
I heard the optics will be coated in maple syrup.
Maybe with this they'll finally find the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
So you aren't actually familiar with Douglas Adams' work then? Because "the end" refers to the death of the universe, not the farthest reaches of the universe. Unless this new telescope can see into the future (and fiction), it's not going to find the Restaraunt. Looks like somebody's name-dropping to win geek points. Sorry, we can spot fakes a mile off.
Telescopes look back in time, not forward.
We might have a shot at a glimpse of the Big Bang Burger Bar, though.
-Peter
"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.
A glorious victory for US scientists -- we seem to have conquered the Canadian Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. My Canadian colleagues will taste the "lite-beer of defeat" at last ;->
A telescope roughly the size of a footabll field? NFL or CFL? A CFL field is much bigger.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
When completed this Canadian telescope may well be the largest single telescope.
However, is it larger than the effective size of the Very Large Telecope array? Or the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope to be built in Chile?
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.
From TFA "B.C. engineering company AMEC" and "AMEC started working on this four years ago and was joined by the National Research Council of Canada to draft concept designs"
Not to mention that it's going to be in Canada, and would be physically built by Canadians in that case.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
First there was the Very Large Telescope.
Then there was the Extremely Large Telescope.
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". The Astonishingly Large Telescope? Also too small. Ditto for "Frighteningly".
Stupefyingly? Or perhaps the Surpassingly Large Telescope?
The Horrifyingly Large Telescope?
Possibly The Nightmarishly Huge Telescope. Or the Blood-Curdlingly Large Telescope.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Sure but how many Libraries of Congress (or LoC) of data can it gather per fortnight is what I really want to know.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Well, yes, I found the end of Mostly Harmless to be a let down. Obviously Douglas Adams wanted the series to end so he wrote as final an ending as you can imagine. If I had enough motivation to be a fanfic writer, I would have created a follow-up based on a loophole that allowed one Earth to survive. It turned out that there is one more dimension than the creators of the transdimensional Guide were aware of. That extra dimension is the place where Bob reigns (was it Old Thrashbarg who worshipped Bob?), and Earth still exists...
...". I should give it another listen soon.
OTOH, the rest of the book was great. The whole 'Perfectly Normal Beasts/Domain of the King' business had me in awe of Adams' imagination. I've actually never read the book, since I have the audio version read by Adams himself. Marvelous to hear him intone, "Click, hum
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
It's Monday morning, and Toronto resident Steve Dorman shares a quick breakfast of "eggs" (a native food) with his "wife" (an officially state-sanctioned mate), and discusses yesterday's poor showing by the hometown team in "baseball" (a popular local sport). After a kiss on his wife's cheek, he hops on the "subway train" (a mode of subterranean transport) to the office.
This is life in exotic Canada City, the capital set deep in the heart of the mysterious land known as Canada (pronounced CAN-a-da).
Like his estimated 35,000 fellow countrymen, Dorman is proud to be a "Canadian." Located 120 miles north of Buffalo, NY, Canada is, according to Dorman, "a nation with a government and laws distinct from those of the United States." It also has a military, a system of taxation, and periodic free elections to select political leader s. It even has its own currency, says Dorman, various denominations of "dollars" that can be exchanged for the many products manufactured in Canada, including Canadian bacon and ice.
Canada City, Canada's largest community, is located in a place called a "province," a subdivision not unlike the cantons of Switzerland. There are 10 Canadian provinces in all, from Nova Scotia in the east to British Columbia in the west. And, much like America's states, nearly every one of the provinces has its own capital. But make no mistake--there's nothing provincial about these provinces. Canada has both feet planted firmly in the 20th century.
"In fact, Canadians enjoy advancements such as refrigerated food, zippers and printing," notes Dorman, an "accountant" who goes to work wearing the comfortable trousers, dress shirt and necktie that form a traditional Canadian costume. "Our industries are large and varied, ranging from logging to automobile manufacturing."
Not too shabby for a nation that just 240 years ago had no electricity.
Canada City
One area in which Canada certainly has the U.S. beat is languages. Canadians speak not only English, but also French. In fact, according to Prime Minister (roughly Canada's equivalent of a president) Jean Chrétien, "French is the primary language in some parts of the country, and English is in others. The national language question has divided our nation terribly, with Quebec even recently threatening to leave the union."
Canada has produced many prominent people who have gone on to great success in hockey. Among them is Colorado Avalanche goaltender Patrick Roy, who says hockey is the "national sport" of the Canadianers.
"It's in our blood, it's part of our heritage, and it brings people together," he says of the sport Canada picked up from America in the late '50s. So appreciative is Canada, it even has hockey teams called the "Oilers" and "Jets," named after its favorite American football teams.
Despite the language problem and other difficulties, at least one Canadianer is optimistic about his country's prospects in the new millennium.
"Canada will remain free, proud and strong in t he new century," says Dorman, heading off for another day of what in Canada is known as "work." "Our nation will continue to be a beacon to those throughout the world who value liberty, dignity and human rights."
Aww, isn't that cute? At times like this, there's really only one thing left to say: Oh, Canada!
This feature has been provided by the Knight-Ridder news service. It is actually an old The Onion article.
The telescope is 30m in diameter.
A football field is roughly 100m long, and 59.4m wide.
By my calculations, the field is about 8x bigger than the telescope.
Canadians Plan to Build World's Biggest Telescope
You misspelled "bong".
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.
I'm sure he was misquoted, but it really bugs me when I (often) see this confusion between astronomy and astrology in the media. At best, it shows the reporter's ignorance of the difference. At worst, it further confuses the public into thinking wrongly that astrology actually has a scientific basis. Sigh.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The Hubble primary mirror is only 2.4 meters. This one is 30 meters. In addition the Hubble's mirror was flawed from it's very creation. http://www.uoguelph.ca/~ebaig/brian.html
The Hubble takes very cool images. But it is obsolete technology. Hubble is not the be-all and end-all of all telescopes for ever and ever. I find it interesting that people almost worship the instrument. In addition it is already past it's original operational life. Someday it will fail.
There are now techniques that correct for the earth's atmospheric distortion which enable earth-based telescopes to be much better than the Hubble. And also, the Hubble cost $1.5 billion!
So is this new telescope worth it? I think it is. Especially since it is being funded by people and companies in the private sector and not by government taxes.
"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.
Nah, probably a Starbucks.
After the exchange rate, this comes to the size of a beaver and will cost $42.69 to build.
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I happen to have the good fortune to work on The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer. We're beginning construction very soon, and it is the successor to the COAST telescope in Cambridge.
The advantage of interferometers is that we can have the effective aperture of 400m (so obtaining high angular resolution) without the problem of building and maintaining a distortion-free enormous mirror. Of course, we don't get the sensitivity, but we do get the resolution.
Incidentally, COAST (Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telsecope), which was built in the late '80s has a better angular resolution than Hubble (although we do have a lot of atmosphere in the way!), and has managed to sucessfully image detail on the surface of stars.
"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.
Hubble is aging, yes, and our technology has improved such that a replacement would be far superior, but the fact that it's orbiting outside the atmosphere makes a big difference in the sorts of things it can photograph. Turbulence is one thing, but the UV and IR that is blocked by our atmosphere can be picked up much more easily from space. Personally, I don't see why Hubble can't surpass every other land-based optical telescope on any level except exposure time (due to its smaller optics compared to many on Earth), since it's got every other advantage. I would imagine that any remaining shortcomings are due to its age. If we could bring it back to upgrade its technology to par with land-based scopes, or replace it with a new scope of the newest tech, it would have significant benefits over its land-based brothers.
The Canadian 'scope won't sit for long atop the list of the world's largest telescope. In fact, Poland has already begun construction of a monstrous telescope nearly triple the size of the one planned for Canada.
The telescope is being installed where the temperature and humidity are nearly constant: several miles underground in an abandoned salt mine.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
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.
What is it with the rash of jokes being downmodded now? This is the fifth or sixth truly funny post this week that I've seen modded down.
Come on, i's *funny* (and yes, I'm Canadian.)