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Discovery Channel Telescope Snaps Inaugural Pictures

Posted by Unknown on from the space-is-always-cool dept.

eldavojohn writes "Two decades ago ... Discovery Channel teamed up with Lowell Observatory and embarked upon a $53 million adventure: the fifth largest telescope in the United States funded entirely without state or federal money. The very first photos snapped with its 16 million pixel camera are in and they look beautiful. Yet to be seen are the simultaneous spectroscopic and imaging observations that should be provided to researchers by the DCT's Ritchey-Chretien instrument cube. Located near a dark-sky site (Coconino National Forest), scientists hope to use this new telescope to answer many research questions including how our solar system formed and how dwarf galaxies evolve. For more telescope porn, check out the DCT's photo tours. Luckily 'the process of planning and building the telescope is due to be featured in a one-hour Discovery Channel documentary set to air in September 2012.' Perhaps there is hope for Discovery Channel to return to its former glory?"

14 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. What's the Matter? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Did my original submission strike a little too close to home?

    Two decades ago (before it went to shit) ...

    Seriously, when I submitted that I was staring down ~10 hours of "Swamp Brothers," "Swamp Loggers" and "Gator Boys." Seriously. Now NatGeo is following suit ... am I just getting curmudgeonly? How is this happening?

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:What's the Matter? by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How is this happening?

      Their goal is to earn money, not to generate quality content.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    2. Re:What's the Matter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Discovery Channel Telescope Snaps Inaugural Pictures

      You would think they could get a press pass to the inaugural, so they wouldn't have to use a telescope.

    3. Re:What's the Matter? by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yep, why bother showing educational programs about astronomy when you can instead show a puerile drama about a couple of retards building shitty motorcycles and constantly arguing with each other?

    4. Re:What's the Matter? by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      It's worse than that; each package is usually a superset of the preceding package. And channels like Discovery tend to be in the basic package, so you don't get a choice to have it or not, unless you don't subscribe to cable at all.

      What I'd like to know is how they determine ratings these days. In the old days, the "Nielsen families" had extra boxes monitoring what they watched. These days, with cable boxes, they can have them report back to the cableco what people are watching, so I imagine they do that, but that doesn't cover people who only subscribe to basic and don't have an extra cable box. They probably just ignore those people.

    5. Re:What's the Matter? by toejam13 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is called the dumbing-down effect.

      Intelligent people have critical analysis skills and therefore tend not to be swayed by televised advertising. So advertisers are left targeting a everyone else. But you need content to bring in that target audience. Shows hosted by Carl Sagan aren't going to do it.

      As long as we have advertisement funded television programming, television will remain a medium for the lowest common denominator of programming. So that means shows involving a huge Quiverfull family of midgets operating a fishing boat out of Alaska and the fun antics of their scandalous daughter who has the audacity to show a little ankle.

      It will be very hard to transition to a television system where all channels are either public-private funded (such as PBS), are subscription based (such as HBO) or are single program PPV. Old people love their free TV and will vote out anyone who dares take it away from them.

  2. condolences by Black+Parrot · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm sorry to hear that their telescope snapped. Maybe they can glue it back together and add a reinforcing rod down the middle.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  3. Minor nitpick in summary by Bootsy+Collins · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not the fifth largest telescope in the United States. It's the fifth largest optical telescope in the continental United States. There are several larger optical telescopes on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.

    1. Re:Minor nitpick in summary by scdeimos · · Score: 2

      It doesn't allow simultaneous observations, either. It's near-simultaneous observations due to the mirror switching that happens in the DCT's RC cube - currently only one of three instruments have use of the telescope, depending on how the mirrors are oriented.

    2. Re:Minor nitpick in summary by iroll · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's funny, because the way I read the summary, I assumed it was the 5th largest privately funded scope.

      Thanks, English ancestors....

      --
      Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
  4. Re:so... by Unkyjar · · Score: 5, Informative

    What taxpayer money was wasted? This telescope was entirely privately funded. Heck, even the summary comments on that:

    Discovery Channel teamed up with Lowell Observatory and embarked upon a $53 million adventure: the fifth largest telescope in the United States funded entirely without state or federal money

  5. Re:16 Megapixles by Score+Whore · · Score: 2

    Once it's above a few megapixels I personally care way more about the optics.

    However in this specific case I wouldn't be surprised if this particular camera -- if it's even sensical to convert to ISO speeds -- is on the order of ISO 0.02441... (1000 times more light sensitive than ISO 25.)

  6. Re:16 Megapixles by mopomi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First, the submitter got the value wrong. The Large Monolithic Imager (LMI) has 36 MPixels (technically, it has 6144x6160 = 37,847,040 pixels), not 16 MPixels.

    http://www.lowell.edu/dct_instruments.php

    Second, being a scientific instrument, it has a rather lot of requirements that your Nikon doesn't; the number of pixels is only one of several parameters engineers trade against each other when building a camera for scientific use.

  7. Re:so... by OakDragon · · Score: 2

    If you’ve got a telescope -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

    -- Barack H. Obama

    --
    Dark Reflection