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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.
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".
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.
...Windex, right?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.