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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.'"
The telescope is located on top of a volcanic peak that is 2,400 meters (about 1.5 miles) above sea level.
Someone call Pierce Brosnan. Tell him to bring NASA's experimental locator beacon.
It's not the size that matters. It's how you use it.
Only yesterday I was looking longingly at the Meade site and wondering if I could possibly justify a whole eight inch LX200 rather than one of those little ETX series things - I can't help thinking they're the equivalent of desktop routers vs a Cisco 6500. In theory the recent drop in the dollar should make them effectively half price (as I'm in the UK and £1 == $2.03 or so today). Sadly it doesn't seem to work that way :(
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
OK.
I was going to moderate as 'flamebait' but then figured I would ask.
Did you intentionally chnage the word hexagonal from the original article or was it a strange aouto-correct error?
If so, you need to ad the word hexagonal to your dictionary.
Otherwise, you have a very strange sense of humor.
It's not the world's largest telescope. There are plenty of telescopes that are larger than this. The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is about 5 meters in diameter larger. Arecibo is about 295 meters larger.
And then you've got the array telescopes like VLA and VLBA, if you wanted to get pedantic about effective telescope size.
Why do they need to change the shape of the mirror? Why can't they just correct the problem using DSP after the fact? Presumably if you know how the atmosphere distorts while taking the image, you can apply the inverse kernel later on...
They already found that, but it required that they use the Big Ear, and listen for the source of a faint but recognizable "Khaaaaan!" that's been reverberating about the galaxy for awhile now.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You might be disappointed if you wait a year, buy the more expensive telescope and have no money left over to buy upgrades.
Some other points:
I always wondered how astronomors calculate for distortions, or even realize if there are distortions to their calculator. Like the light data they receive from other galaxies far far away. How do they know if the light went through some medium that cause it to slow down, then went fast again, or if what they are looking at is actually a mirror galaxy that's reflecting something else, mirages, weird anomalies and physics that we sitll dont understand, or any other spacial distortions between here and there that might screw with data
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.
During the daytime the telescope is used as a webcam for a local beach.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The reason we look for things in the heavens is because it gives us a larger-scale observation than the close up images we get of the way things work from down here. Just imagine how difficult it would be to study a nuclear submarine from the inside, whereas a picture taken from the outside would tell you what you were inside of. Otherwise, you would see passages, pipes, wires and apparatus but it would take a while to figure out what that all did if you'd never seen a submarine before (and were new to the concept).
Fresh wallpapers for our desktops!
Seriously though, it's both incredibly funny and somewhat sad that that seems to be the Hubble's greatest legacy. Still, I'll happily drink to continued scientific progress funded by people's desire for cool pictures.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
There's a great image of the first shot taking with the telescope here
Thank God I'm an atheist!
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 ;).
I disagree. The reason we "look for things in the heavens", is the same reason we look for things just about anywhere else. It doesn't matter if it's significant or not, or if anything useful will come out of it. What's important is that by looking, we satisfy our own curiosity.
Apparently Big Bird isn't identical in all the Sesame Street franchises - the version from Spain had "a tall, pinkish female bird called Gallina Caponata". But if you're looking for a Grand Canary, and you've got a big telescope, he's probably what you needed...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I thought they were starting to need so much power that the atmosphere was too much of a hurdle, and that's why telescopes like Hubble was built.
So why are they building this one now and not e.g. helping fund the James Webb Telescope or perhaps some other upcoming plan?
Is there still much left to discover from the surface of Earth?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Isn't the world's largest operational telescope always up and running? There may be a new largest, but the old one was the largest back then as well, as were all the ones before it.
It is the height of hubris to assume that only humans can wreck a planet. A large comet or asteroid doesn't give a rat's ass about whether it will be destroying humanity or dinosaur-ity when it hits. The rest of the universe is quite capable of destroying the earth without any human participation; why should we not look for a way to get out of Dodge?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Wonder why they used Gran Canaria over Tenerife right next door, which has a peak almost twice the height as the highest on Gran Canaria, with Pico Teide being comparable to Mauna Kea... I mean I guess logistically building it might have been easier as it wasn't as steep, but I thought part of the point was to avoid as much atmosphere as possible...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
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?
Strictly speaking the "largest telescopes" will always be the radio telescopes, spanning several square kilometers in some cases. I know a professor at CMU who is currently designing what he hopes will be the largest radio telescope in the world. If they intended to call it the largest *optical* telescope, they really should have said that. "Largest telescope" is quite the claim.
"Before criticizing someone, first walk a mile in his shoes. Then, you'll be a mile away... and you'll have his shoes."
Especially when it comes to telescopes. Larger aperature means more light is collected for imaging, and the more light you collect the shorter your exposure times need to be. And with the limited number of telescopes in the world, multiplied by the limited number of hours actually available for observing at each one (you need a clear sky, on a night near the new moon so that the glare doesn't wash out your images), cutting your exposure times is paramount.
Larger aperature also means higher resolution images and that dimmer and dimmer objects can be observed. When you're trying to find the very first stars in the universe, only the biggest telescopes in the world will do.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert