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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.
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.
As ffkom notes above the ELT is a better comparison for next-gen optical imagery; the SKA doesn't really count since it's a radio telescope and doesn't take "pictures" as such - although the data produced can be visualised as a kind of image. The SKA is coming along fine, btw, with the 64 dishes of the MeerKAT array in South Africa currently undergoing final testing (some dishes are already fully operational), the 36 dishes of the Australian ASKAP array are in operation, and 256 antennae "tiles" of the Australian Murchison Widefield Array are also complete and in operation with the completion of Phase II earlier this year; providing half of the initial proposal for 512 tiles.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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".
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
The bit you're missing is the telescope orbits the Sun but stays close to Earth. On one side the orbit is slightly high (0 deg), on the other it is slightly low (180 deg), 90 degrees around the orbit it is slightly fast, and at 270 it is slightly slow. The net result is it appears to circle the L2 point and stays out of the Earth's shadow.
Total diameter has much to do with the angular resolution, that is, how small a thing you can see.
The area has to do with how much light you gather.
The quality of the image has to do with the quality of the optics - physical and adaptive.
A modern telescope is a complex machine and employs a bunch of tricks to get those pretty pictures on APOD.
'centuries' are not SI units either. Do you perhaps mean we're 63.115 gigaseconds from a somewhat arbitrary time reference?