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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.
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.
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'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.
The reason you can't do this is because the purpose of the telescope is light amplification and magnification. The magnification could maybe work without adaptive optics, but if the light from the object does not get intensified by the large amount of reflector area applied, then you end up with dim images. It's also difficult to get sharp images with DSP as the light coming in contains more information than the sensor can send to the DSP. If the DSP instead applies corrective measures to the optics, you capture the image on the CCD better than if you applied it to only the data. It's a matter of losing the data which is NOT gathered by the CCD as a result of atmospheric distortion which prevents such an approach.
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 ;).
Did you intentionally chnage the word hexagonal from the original article or was it a strange aouto-correct error?
I had a telescope with "12 homosexual segments of the primary mirror for testing and observations" once. Unfortunately, all it was good for is observing Uranus.
During the daytime the telescope is used as a webcam for a distant beach
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?
Sure, Tenerife's highest point is higher, but you're not allowed to build anything on the top of the Teide. The current observatories on Tenerife are approximately at the same height as those on La Palma. Yes, the vulcanoes on La Palma are still "active", but it's very benign activity, a little flow of lava once in a few decades. Those vulcanoes are also to the south of the island, while the observatories are closer to the north. The seeing quality at both sites is comparable I think.