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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.
they implemented an unsharp-mask algo
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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?
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, it will be put in space by SpaceX. They'll drive it up the HypeLoop on a Tesla Model 4's with the Space Launcher mode.
There will be one mirror in the center and 6 around it, forming something quite round, so total diameter is quite close to the collecting-area-equivalent diameter. 80/7? Too much programming led to only one meaning of the word "array" in your head. Take a break.
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
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.
it's how you use... No. It's pretty much the size of your telescope.
Yes they could have worded it better like 'effective or equivalent diameter'.
Each of the seven mirrors has a diameter of 8.4 m, together that amounts to equivalent to a 24.5 m. mirror but with the added advantage you can now adjust the segments to counteract atmospheric turbulence.
The biggest advantage is it is easier to manufacture a smaller mirror to the required accuracy.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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
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.
Yeah, and they took out the headphone jack as well. :P
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.