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World's Largest Telescope Up and Running
apdyck writes "ITWire is reporting that the world's largest telescope is now up and running, conducting one-year series of tests. The Great Canary Telescope, located in the Canary Islands, is the largest telescope in the world at 10.4 m (34') in diameter. Not for your average stargazer! 'The reflective telescope, sometimes also called GranTeCan, uses technology called adaptive optics, in which the mirror changes its shape in order to correct distortions of light caused by the Earth's atmosphere. The telescope is part of the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, located on the island of La Palma, Spain, within the Atlantic Ocean.'"
I've been waiting for this to be completed, since I sometimes work at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, and the GTC is based on (and only slightly larger than) Keck I and II.
Keck held the "world's largest" title (among optical scopes) for the last 15 years; it'll be interesting to see whether anything steals the crown from the GTC in the near future.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Pretty cool, you can zoom right in. Guess we'll have to wait for Google to scan the Earth at night so we can see it exposed ;).
And I'm getting a kick out of these replies...
No, really! I work for the University of Floriday Astronomy department. The department has a 5% share of the GTC, and we're looking into another 5%. That may not seem like much, but if you consider one night of 10 meter time can be enough data for a graduate thesis, it's a massive amount of time.
The IR instrumentation group in my building is building a _giant_ instrument for the GTC. It's called FLAMINGOS-II. IR is where it's at in astronomy right now, so it's neat to be in an up-and-coming department.
If you guys have any questions about the telescope, I'll do my best to answer them or find out for you.
Adaptive optics are overcoming the problems with imaging through the atmosphere. And since you brought up Hubble... all you Hubble-repair-mission fanboys out there might take into consideration that sending up the space shuttle costs somewhere between $500 million and $1.5 billion (depending on who you ask). Now consider that this telescope cost $180 million to build. Can you imagine what kind of ground based optical telescope you could make for $1.5 billion? It would outperform Hubble by leaps and bounds.
That's just about the absolute *worst* advice you could give. Someone is interested enough in astronomy to consider a telescope costing a few hundred dollars, but is having trouble justifying the cost, and you tell them to buy a $15k[*] scope?
Your condescending "Meades are toys" translates to "stay away from astronomy". If someone is interested in the sky, there's nothing better than for them to buy an inexpensive telescope or a nice pair of binoculars. That's an investment even the most casual of interested parties can feel comfortable with. Maybe their interest will fade, but they'll at least have had some exposure, which is better than the none they'll get if they don't buy a telescope at all.
On the other hand, they might become quite enthusiastic, and find their trusty old Meade is no longer sufficient. In that case, they may very well decide to move beyond their "toy" telescope (which is nothing of the kind) and make the massive investment in a higher quality scope. But the time for that is much later.
Public participation in science is low enough as it is. Suggesting a $15k - $50k+ initial investment, and ridiculing more reasonably priced tools which are *vastly superior* to anything Galileo had ever used is most certainly not the way to go about correcting that. In fact, it seems quite obvious that it will have the exact opposite effect.
[*] $15k is the cheapest scope. They don't list the prices of the most expensive ones, but the highest price they list is $54k! And they suggest a finder scope that's just shy of $3k! For the finder scope! That really seemed like sound advice to you?