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Adaptive Thirty Meter Telescope Sees Progress
Hugh Pickens writes "Caltech and the University of California have been making progress toward the development and construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) with the recent $200 million commitment from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The core of the TMT Observatory will be a wide-field, alt-az Ritchey-Chretien telescope with a 492 segment, 30 meter diameter primary mirror, a fully active secondary mirror and an articulated tertiary mirror. TMT will be the first ground-based astronomy telescope designed with adaptive optics as an integral system element that will sense atmospheric turbulence in real-time, correct the optical beam of the telescope to remove its effect, and enable true diffraction-limited imaging on the ground. TMT will have 144 times the collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope and a spatial resolution at near-infrared and longer wavelengths more than ten times better, equivalent to observing above the Earth's atmosphere for many observations at a fraction of the cost of a space-based observatory. TMT will reach further and see more clearly than previous telescopes by a factor of 10 to 100 depending on the observation and will be a fundamental tool for the investigation of large-scale structure in the young universe including the era in which most of the stars and heavy elements were formed."
And I can't even find a decent pair of binoculars.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
You don't mean the Russian spacecraft of that name then...
All that fancy schmancy adaptve optics will still suck when it's raining.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
...I wonder what progress looks like through a thirty meter telescope?
They should post the pics so we can all see, unless it's bad news... I don't think I want to see bad news today even if it is through a thirty meter telescope.
It's nice to see a telescope with an OBJECTIVE, QUANTIFIABLE name.
Just look at some of these idiotic names for serious telescopes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Magellan_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope
Terms like "Large" and "Giant" don't really mean very fucking much, do they? Seems like astronomy caught more of the frat types than the other sciences.
We can spy on Padmé.
Seek and ye shall find.
Doesn't look that cool to me
http://www.forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1197130425
Pah, if I were building a telescope I would build one that could see at least 300 metres.
buried as lame.
liqbase
Can someone in the know reconcile this statement:
TMT will be the first ground-based astronomy telescope designed with adaptive optics as an integral system element that will sense atmospheric turbulence in real-time, correct the optical beam of the telescope to remove its effect, and enable true diffraction-limited imaging on the ground.
with the adaptive optics capability of the quite beautiful HET at McDonald Observatory? I suppose with any number of very specific qualifiers, one could claim to be "first".
What is the difference between the TMT and the HET with regards to "adaptive optics" and being able to negate the effects of atmospheric turbulence in real time (which the HET can do)?
BTW, if you ever have the chance, the McDonald Observatory in Ft. Davis, TX is well worth the trip!
Wow, most telescopes see stars or other celestial bodies. This one can actually see progress!
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
to "spot" earth-like planets around other stars.
But it's a start.
Just think how many milliseconds of war you could fight.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I predict they'll find out that all the stars in the galactic core went nova some millions of years ago in a vast chain reaction ... and that the resulting blast wave will reach Earth about 30,000 years from now. Better start looking around ... I hear real estate in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud is a good buy this time of year.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I hate telescopes that don't do the wavelengths we can actually see. Radio telescope? BORING.
If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. Give me pretty pictures that represent what I would see if I were floating in space around the target body. Everything is just a bullshit waste of money.
Good. Now lets put it on the Moon and get another 10x out her.
Isn't it about time? Or have we become so inept we can't even imagine such things any more?
:T:R:A:N:S:
...is to measure the red shift of progress as it slips farther and farther away.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hobby Eberly is basically a very low-budget version of telescopes like Keck. It has the same mirror size (and therefore the same light collecting ability), but they made several design compromises to knock the cost down from $100 million (for Keck) to about $15 million. Most of these compromises reduce the image quality, so they don't even bother trying. They just mounted a bunch of spectrographs since somebody taking a spectrum of a single object usually doesn't care about the nonplanar focal surface and correspondingly tiny effective field of view.
Microsoft delenda est!
You want to build schools when there are people STARVING out there?
You cold-hearted bastard!
Bah, by the time the blast wave reaches us, we'll be able to shield all our systems with giant statis fields. :)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Think of all the schools you could have built instead.
With all due respect, this will be the most important school ever built to date when it is up and running, it has many times the potential in terms of a Hubble comparison. I tip my hat to Gordon Moore, and might even have an intel cpu in the next computer I build.
Schools teach a pretty fixed view of things and move forward at agonizingly slow speeds in their curriculum choices. Building more schools is an admirable effort, but this has the potential for rapidly changing what those schools teach forever, something that's pretty badly needed IMNSHO. The knowledge gained from this instrument will, like the Hubble's output before it, trickle down to the neighborhood classrooms, by word of mouth if by no other means, in spite of the foot dragging the ID proponents will exhibit.
My impression of Gordon Moore, the man, was just recalibrated upward quite a ways.
I'm hopeful that the images from first light will be so impressive to Mr. Moore that he will then do like Mr. Keck did on seeing the first light from his first 5 meter on Mona Kea, and he will sit down and write a check for a 2nd one like Mr. Keck did. What a sight it would be, to see the first light of the first stars as they started up, and do it in stereo vision. I hope I live that long because this is gonna take a few years to build.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a
mountain top.
Yes, you are quite right, except there is already a dog fight between Twenty Metre Telescope and Ten Metre Telescope to register for the acronym TMT, so, glad you quit the the party of idiocy and warm welcome to the party of ambiguity
by trying things other than ridiculous expensive space experiments. Now I hope they just please recruit some of the scientists away from super-collider projects. So I can sleep at night without dreams of black holes forming up through my garbage disposal.
... this could be made for human eyes?
I mean some way to detect if the retina image is correct and if it's not, adjust image transformations dynamically to provide optimal seeing? (though I know such thing already exists in a "static" way...)
It is not surprising that it takes a thirty meter telescope to see progress, because there sure ain't any of it nowhere near, is it?
May we live long and die out
HOW DARE YOU THINK OF FOOD! Think of all the people who don't even have hands to eat with!
SRSLY.
Since 1610, the largest telescopes have gotten bigger in area by 3.5% every year.
-- Stephen.
Well, the Rooskies didn't have "Progress" then, but I worked at a DoD observatory where that was exactly what we did. Meaning, we geared up the 'scopes to watch the Russian & Chinese spacecraft (and, maybe, 'illuminate' them once in a while, or bounce a laser off the reflectors WE left on the moon).
You didn't need a 30 meter telescope to look at something only 90 miles away--straight up! Can't really mention which 'scopes but there are images of them on the web. They watched Kosmonauts working outside of Mir,... or whatever was up back in the '70s. (Oops! Did I say "scopes"? I meant "observatory"!)
Hell! At 90 miles, and with a thirty-meter mirror, the sparks of the static discharge from pulling your socks apart would blow out the sensors on their experiments! Not that the Russians were allowed to wear socks!...