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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
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.
Seems like someone is trying hard to overcompensate some inadequacy...
"Why yes, I DO operate the Ginormousely Absurd You-Can't-Believe-How-Fucking-Huge-It-Is Oversized-By-Any-Reasonable-Standard-Of-Measurement-And-By-Most-Unreasonable-Ones-As-Well Motherfucking Large Telescope"
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.
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
Or in the dark...