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A Telescope as Big as the Earth
Roland Piquepaille writes "A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope. The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that 'the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.'"
...all data from the Shanghai telescope was filtered and replaced with promotional material for the Peoples Republic of China. Apparently the galaxy bears a striking resemblance to Chairman Mao.
does it run Linux?
My blog
Can we use this gigantic mirror to fight global warming. I mean, there's no chance that an asteroid will by chance hit it and fry us now is there?
This technique is being used.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Wow! And I thought SCT's had a large central obstruction.
/.
Ok. That might be the geekiest joke in the histroy of
:(
I have seen radio telescopes linked in such a way to form a "larger" antenna. Is this similar?
It would make a great plugin for google earth. Instead of zooming in on earth from space, you could zoom into space from earth.
I for one, welcome our giant eyed, galactic..... I soviet Russia, the world telescopes ....
Scientist can finally peer deep into goat.....
be gentle.
If I went around claiming I was an emperor...they'd put me away!
> A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a
> single world telescope.
Not to be overly pedantic, but the data were streamed from all over the world to a location in Europe, then processed, and then streamed to China for viewing.
Even though they weren't going over the public net, that's still almost certainly >1000ms latency. Harldy "real time".
Although, I suppose that's acceptable on top of the two and a half years it took for the photons to get to us.
I think I would rather have one high altitude large aperture 'scope looking at an object all night rather than two at the opposite sides of the world. The ones on the opposite sides of the world won't be able to look for long before one of them disappears over the horizon. Not only that but they are looking through the maximum amount of atmosphere.
This stunt is a technical accomplishment but maybe not that important in and of itself. What would get me excited would be a couple of orbiting 'scopes.
And so is the lucky camera.
_ lucky_camera.html
News story a few days ago:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/070905_tw
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these!
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Coordinating scopes on the moon, mars, and earth - that would be quite a "light bucket", no?
It could be worse. The article could have been written by twitter. At least Roland Piquepaille doesn't tie the article into Microsoft even though the story has nothing to do with Microsoft.
I don't see a link to any videos or images - are there any? After all, you can false color radio frequencies into a visual range image. Will any videos be released, or would the content be too slow and boring to broadcast?
One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart.
This is the real story - FTL communications!
We have problems on earth, but most of them will never be solved. Poverty will always exist. Stupidity will always exist. So will criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, and failure. We can either spend our time obsessing over the negative, or we can choose to explore space and find a new future. I'm glad that we continue to probe space, to consider sending up ships, and most all, that we keep space exploration alive in our minds as a source of hope.
technical writing / development
(get off my porch)
This is known as VLBI, and it's been done since the 1960's. During the mission of the Japanese VSOP satellite, we had telescopes bigger than the Earth.
What is new here is the real time data transport, not the observations.
I wonder what the Storm botnet could do?
So, when measuring the distance between each of the telescopes, did he do it through the planet (diameter), or did he measure the distance across the surface of the planet (circumference)? Cause that kind makes a huge difference, and really screws up any valid comparison between the two distances.
~Sticky
/You know, kind of like comparing English furlongs and Australian wallabies. Just way too different.
Just seconds after the feeds started the galaxy imagery was somehow lost and replaced with the standard BSOD screen.
Actually light from the closest know star takes about 8 minutes to get to the earth.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Apparently, they must not have seen anything good, because there are no pics in the article... I don't know why they'd run an article about some awesome new telescope -- without the most important feature of any telescope -- a picture of what it can see.
stuff |
According to NASA...
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
the universe will apparently head towards the Big Blue (screen of death). It is inevitable.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The news here is using the Internet for a real-time transmission of a substantial bandwidth of RF to a central correlation receiver. Non-real-time "whole earth telescopes" have been running since the 1970s. It's called Very Long Baseline Interferometry.
Fiat Lux.
Did they zoom in on the Giant goatse err hole in the center of the universe?
3C 273 is a Quasar, not a galaxy (According to wikipedia at least). Are they talking about the galaxy containing/near the Quasar, or what?
Because as I recall, Beowulf killed Grendel's mother. During the whole story of Beowulf, he is never defeated, though he does die of his wounds after defeating the dragon.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...because their 52kb/s upload from Comcast just didn't cut it.
Is there something I'm missing about Roland that I should know?
I am not an atomic playboy.
So why not a telescope as big as the ORBIT of the Earth? ...as long as you're looking at something like a galaxy, that isn't going to change the shape of its features over the course of a year. Any reason why this wouldn't be possible?
The good news is that 94% of every human being who has ever lived is now dead.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I mean, what they observed already happened long ago. We're just observing it now, and that's fine, but theoretically they could just each independantly observe, timedcode, and then sync it all up later.
Its not like it was a live event where you had to have it just then.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Yeah, yeah. I know.
:D
But I just had to do it.
In South Korea, only old people use world telescopes.
"The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second"
This means that over 10 seconds 2560Mb of data would be streamed, according to NASA.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Oh this world is so terrible. I'm sure there's a great new world out there just waiting for me! A place where the trees are green, the air is fresh, Paris Hilton isn't there, George Bush hasn't invaded it yet, and there's always bacon cooking in the kitchen.
But running away from your problems doesn't always work.
This is a redundant array of telescopes
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Bin Laden is releasing a new screed against America, and the west in general, apparently Reps. Murtha and Pelosi are writing his speeches. Although, he'd benefit from Michael Moores cinematography.
Looking into the workings of the Universe is against Allah's wishes. Geeks will die because of this.
[citation needed]
Well, requested anyway - sounds interesting. Could you link us up?
You must be new here.
Fear the power of NTie!
All of this trouble, and all we seem to have gotten from it is a picture of the Earth (telescope pointed at a giant space mirror?) and a picture of one of the telescopes themselves (don't know how they got that one).
You have to crosscorrelate two sources to created an effective larger aperture. (From recently deceased Stanford Professor Ronald Bracewell's textbooks.) Radiowaves vibrate between kiloHertz to gigaHertz. Current electronics is fast enough to capture, transmit, and record both amplitude and phase of radio signals. Its not fast enough for optical teraHertz yet.
Before signal processing was fast enough they cross-correlated the analog radio signals. This is how VBLI astronomy works.
The do this with optical signals from fairly close telescopes (hundreds of meters) using special optical pipes. They can simulate a couple hundred meter telescope this way. One of the telescope clusters in Chile has this ability.
It sounds like synchronization is the keyword here. Who cares that the telescopes were synchronized ? As long as they follow the same object and timecode all their datas, the synchronization could have been made offline. Or am I missing something ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
You have to be very careful where you point an earth-sized telescope. For example, you are not allowed to look into a bathroom. With all those black holes and dark matter out there, that might be hard to avoid.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
That joke was a lot geekier than I expected. Honestly, with all that crap about a central obstruction and the subject being astronomy, I thought the punchline was going to say something about Uranus.
Only I thought we were going to have to wait till they did it with telescopes in orbit. So when are they publishing the pictures after all the data is combined? Huh? When?
Of Metcalfe's little understood, but immensely powerful, network value principle, z-squared.
Don't mind me, or bother responding to this i'm only commenting so I can recall this from my profile.
Hope is the currency of fools
what?! they made a beowulf cluster of telescopes? oh noez!
stuff
Playing around with Google Earth I note these telescopes are on nearly a straight line! With two more, one in Somalia and one in Alaska one would have the telescopes in a near perfect cross! Please Somalia and the US, join!
Step 1: scientists get together, synchronize watches
Step 2: scientists go home to telescopes
Step 3: at 2pm EST scientists plug in the telescopes
QED
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Send a few radio telescopes in different directions in Voyager-like trajectories. Every year you'd get higher and higher resolution. All the signals would reach Earth at approximately the same time, so the interferometry would need to cope with just a 15-minute difference between the signals, even though the telescopes would be multiple light-hours apart.
As a bonus, these telescopes would also increase, year by year, the range of the parallax technique, the most accurate technique for finding stellar distances.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....