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Construction Begins On $1 Billion Telescope That Will Take Pictures 10 Times Sharper Than Hubble's (qz.com)
The $1 billion Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile is officially under construction with a scheduled date of operation in 2024. The telescope "will have an array of seven enormous mirrors totaling 80 feet in diameter, giving it 10 times the precision of the Hubble telescope," reports Quartz. "Among its advances is technology to help it correct for the distorting effect of Earth's atmosphere by using software to make hundreds of adjustments per second to its array of secondary mirrors." From the report: The project's architects, a consortium of universities and institutions in the U.S., Korea, and Australia, chose to build in Chile's Atacama desert for its clear, dry skies. Astronomers will use the Magellan Telescope to study the origins of elements and the birth of stars and galaxies, and to examine planets that have been identified as potentially harboring life. Mother Nature Network has an article highlighting nine of the largest new telescopes expected to begin operation in the next decade.
80 feet = 24 meter
really slashdot, SI units have been published in 1960.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
will be ready in 2034 and will only take 5x sharper images.
Stop the American refugees from fleeing south to freedom you mean.
WTF does "total diameter" have to do with anything? 7 mirrors, each having a diameter of 80/7 ft, would have the same area as a single 30 ft diameter mirror.
they implemented an unsharp-mask algo
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Just wait until a bird takes a dump on glass.
For comparison, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For details on the ELT, see https://www.eso.org/public/uni...
Will be interesting to see which one will actually start taking pictures of higher quality, first.
It's a quote from what would have been converted from Metric by the editor at Quartz magazine.
Here's another humdinger from the same article: "Instead, it will orbit the Sun, at a distance 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, three times farther from us than Hubble."
I suspect they're out by a factor of 1000 on Hubble's orbit there.
How's that Square Milometer Array thing coming along?
How quaint and old fashioned. Kind of like living in the stone age.
Seriously, this is the 21st century, use SI units for chrissake.
The fun stuff is now the adaptive optics have perfected to a point where the astronomer pretend theoretical optical precision will be atteignable, albeit on a smaller field of view.
Like described here: https://www.eso.org/public/aus...
Radio telescopes are something different.Their images are in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, obviously, and radio waves have a frequency which makes them able to be recorded with their phase and all. So the signal of several antennas can be recombined by computer like with a giant interferometric radio telescope.
Makes for sharper images, like if you had really a square kilometer dish. With holes. But still gives sharp images.
With optical waves you have to physically recombine the light to do interferometry. The frequency of visible light is order of magnitudes higher than radio waves. Thus optical interferometers are rarer and "smaller".
Come on, you know it is already in orbit.
So we wasted all that money on a lesser telescope when this one would have already been out there? Holy shit!
I'm from Chile so I guess I'm a "Brown American",
Guess what??? I NEVER asked for white leftist people to call me "brown" and I ***fucking hate*** that term. Please ***STOP*** calling me BROWN.
I didn't ask you to and you're not doing me ANY favor. I don't want to be called that. Capiche????
The biggest telescope mirrors (8metres) all seem to be made at the University of Arizona, at their lab underneath the footballs stadium. Here are a couple of fun videos. Fascinating engineering.
Making the mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope: https://youtu.be/c-lBKuHqHk0
17 Tonnes of Spinning Glass: https://youtu.be/BP9HNVuGb-g
it's how you use... No. It's pretty much the size of your telescope.
Think of how many children we could educate, thus ensuring they never grow up republican.
...Windex, right?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Wow, that's like a surface area of 8650 square cubits or something...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
it's not the DPI, people: it's the filters.
tone
Ken Rockwell will have a review shortly after this is released. His review will state that although more mega-pixels does not equal sharper images, this is a great imaging device and you should support his website by clicking the links above to buy your gear.
28 years after Hubble and it's only 10x sharper? Lame.
A billion for a telescope??
But, think of how many diversity training classes you could hold, with that kind of money?
Think of how many women and Eskimos you could teach to code?
How many "sustainable" things you could, er, sustain with all those external funds??
Priorities, people!!
Boy, you try to speak up for marginalized and underrepresented populations, and what do you get ... modded to oblivion by the shills of the Telescope Industrial Complex.
The measurement from the left edge to right edge determines the resolution - even if there are gaps. Telescopes for longer wavelengths often have gaps of several meters, I order to stretch out each dimension. Have a look at thr VLA - it's shaped like a Y, with nothing over most of the surface area.
While the max dimension edge-to-edge determines the resolution, the surface area determines the minimum brightness of objects the telescope can see. That is, how faint/weak something can be and still be detected by the telescope.
* Yes, the VLA operates on colors (wavelengths) beyond what the human eye can see. We call those colors radio. This makes no difference - its just another wavelength of EMR.
Oh cool, maybe we can turn it around and take a selfie on Earth as it burns and the food supply completely fails from climate change. Maybe we should have spent a billion dollars on renewable energy sources.
and here is the next conversion problem.
A billion is 10^12 in non english speaking countries
one, tousand, million, milliard, billion, billiard and so on
Exactly this. It's about intent, not skin color.
Identity politics promotes outright lies to maintain it's FUD narrative.
A billion is a huge waste of taxpayer money just so that star gazer scientist can continue to look for new worthless discoveries in order to get more notches on their egos.