Light is just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that runs all the way from radio waves (very low frequency and long wave lengths) to stuff like gamma rays (high frequency and short wavelengths). All of these are 'light' in a sense and carry useful astronomical data.
For example, many galaxies (known as radio galaxies) emit strongly in these low frequency bands and a telescope such as this allows them to be observed so we might get some clue as to what's going on.
Radio telescopes must be huge to achieve a decent resolution, which goes as (wavelength)/(size of aperature). In this case wavelength is on the order of centimeters to meters and aperature is on the order of 100 meters.
Also, the Very Large Array, as seen in the adaptation of Carl Sagen's Contact is a radio telescope.
See NRAO for some examples of what radio astronomy is all about.
My point was that Relativity was not conceived in an intellectual void. Ie) Einstein wasn't approving patents one day and suddenly decided that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames. (This is pretty much a result of Maxwell's Equations -- the speed predicted for an EM wave was nearly exact to the value of light, so if light is an EM wave, then its speed is the same regardless of reference frame -- it just took Einstein to elevate it to a principle.)
Also, credit where credit is due has nothing to do with the fact that someone is not able to publish based on the current political climate. You can challenge their character, but the genius of their ideas undoubtably influenced later generations.
Let's not forget that the theory of relativity was concieved by one man, all alone, without contact to the "greatest minds of the day".
I hope you were joking, my friend. The concept of special relativity had been in development for several years, perhaps starting when Maxwell suddenly noticed that his equations weren't invarient under Galilean (Newtonian) transformations. If you study a bit of rudimentary E&M (say a bar magnent moving through an electric field) you see that the E vector will not be the same in all inertial reference frames... think a little bit and viola, you have Lorentzian transformations.
Ever wonder why the special relativity transforms you learn in intro physics aren't Einsteinian transformations? Hrm...
Also, GTR was a clever amalgomation of theories developed by several thinkers, including Gauss, Leibniz (read the letters between Clark, a Newtonian advocate and Leibniz and you see the beginnings of a relativistic nature of space and time (though not nearly as sophisticated as GTR)), Mach, and Poincare.
Of course, this dosen't take away from the genius of Einstein, but still, it dosen't give credit where credit is due.
In Steven Weinberg's book, Gravitation and Cosmology (Wiley and Sons, 1972) there is an excellent first chapter on the development of this science. It's a good book overall, you should check it out.
Why not just use xephem? It will do the exact same thing as you describe Terraserver does, and will show up data in optical, where this is in infrared. Unless you have a *really* nice backyard setup or whatnot, you're not going to see too much useful in these pictures. Ie) you won't see what you see in the pictures.
Better yet, just learn your Dec and RA, and you can just do it yourself. Zenith dec at your home is just your latitude and RA is the sidreal time of your area.
Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?
Think about trying to blast an 8.4m mirror into space -- imagine how much fuel you'd have to expend and how much it would cost. I once read that one space shuttle mission costs up around a billion dollars per launch, the cost of the payload not withstanding.
The dual Gemini telescopes that NOAO and a group of others are putting together are nearly 4 times the size of HST. NGST, or the next generation space telescope is years away from being launched (2010, maybe?) and will only be 6.4m.
(For those who don't know, a bigger mirror means more light gathering power (ie, fainter objects.) and higher spatial resolution (things are less fuzzy), so it is in effect, possible to build ground telescopes that are big enough to out resolve HST, even after dealing with atmosphereic corrections.
(Also, fwiw, spain will be building a 15m on the canary isles soon.) There is also the Large Binocular Telescope in AZ that will be going on line in 5 years or so that will have 2 8m mirrors that have the resolution of 1 18m mirror, and will allow astronomers even higher resolution.
So, the say it in a line: space is not the end all and be all of optical astronomy, no matter what STScI wants you to believe.
Particle physics has more immediate worries on its hands. String theory is a lot like several of the (current) developments in particle physics (ie: supersymmatry). It's elegant, and solves a bevy of problems, yet there is no experimental proof for them -yet-.
The upgrades to the Tevatron at Fermilab, and the completion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2006 will provide energy scales large enough to create and observe superpartners. (And perhaps the Higgs boson, if you're familiar with the Standard Model). On the horizon after that are are the Very LHC, or a giant linear accelerator -- then, and only then, are we going to get even close to start solving mysteries like this empiracally.
Bear in mind though, that Maxwells equations (and even Newton's) equations went unsupported for years (even almost a century) before they were widely accepted. Most of modern particle physics is young by comparision, and the energy barriers are much greater, so its not surprising there is no evidence so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Light is just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that runs all the way from radio waves (very low frequency and long wave lengths) to stuff like gamma rays (high frequency and short wavelengths). All of these are 'light' in a sense and carry useful astronomical data.
For example, many galaxies (known as radio galaxies) emit strongly in these low frequency bands and a telescope such as this allows them to be observed so we might get some clue as to what's going on.
Radio telescopes must be huge to achieve a decent resolution, which goes as (wavelength)/(size of aperature). In this case wavelength is on the order of centimeters to meters and aperature is on the order of 100 meters.
Also, the Very Large Array, as seen in the adaptation of Carl Sagen's Contact is a radio telescope.
See NRAO for some examples of what radio astronomy is all about.
My point was that Relativity was not conceived in an intellectual void. Ie) Einstein wasn't approving patents one day and suddenly decided that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames. (This is pretty much a result of Maxwell's Equations -- the speed predicted for an EM wave was nearly exact to the value of light, so if light is an EM wave, then its speed is the same regardless of reference frame -- it just took Einstein to elevate it to a principle.)
Also, credit where credit is due has nothing to do with the fact that someone is not able to publish based on the current political climate. You can challenge their character, but the genius of their ideas undoubtably influenced later generations.
Let's not forget that the theory of relativity was concieved by one man, all alone, without contact to the "greatest minds of the day".
I hope you were joking, my friend. The concept of special relativity had been in development for several years, perhaps starting when Maxwell suddenly noticed that his equations weren't invarient under Galilean (Newtonian) transformations. If you study a bit of rudimentary E&M (say a bar magnent moving through an electric field) you see that the E vector will not be the same in all inertial reference frames... think a little bit and viola, you have Lorentzian transformations.
Ever wonder why the special relativity transforms you learn in intro physics aren't Einsteinian transformations? Hrm...
Also, GTR was a clever amalgomation of theories developed by several thinkers, including Gauss, Leibniz (read the letters between Clark, a Newtonian advocate and Leibniz and you see the beginnings of a relativistic nature of space and time (though not nearly as sophisticated as GTR)), Mach, and Poincare.
Of course, this dosen't take away from the genius of Einstein, but still, it dosen't give credit where credit is due.
In Steven Weinberg's book, Gravitation and Cosmology (Wiley and Sons, 1972) there is an excellent first chapter on the development of this science. It's a good book overall, you should check it out.
Why not just use xephem? It will do the exact same thing as you describe Terraserver does, and will show up data in optical, where this is in infrared. Unless you have a *really* nice backyard setup or whatnot, you're not going to see too much useful in these pictures. Ie) you won't see what you see in the pictures.
Better yet, just learn your Dec and RA, and you can just do it yourself. Zenith dec at your home is just your latitude and RA is the sidreal time of your area.
Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?
Think about trying to blast an 8.4m mirror into space -- imagine how much fuel you'd have to expend and how much it would cost. I once read that one space shuttle mission costs up around a billion dollars per launch, the cost of the payload not withstanding.
The dual Gemini telescopes that NOAO and a group of others are putting together are nearly 4 times the size of HST. NGST, or the next generation space telescope is years away from being launched (2010, maybe?) and will only be 6.4m.
(For those who don't know, a bigger mirror means more light gathering power (ie, fainter objects.) and higher spatial resolution (things are less fuzzy), so it is in effect, possible to build ground telescopes that are big enough to out resolve HST, even after dealing with atmosphereic corrections.
(Also, fwiw, spain will be building a 15m on the canary isles soon.) There is also the Large Binocular Telescope in AZ that will be going on line in 5 years or so that will have 2 8m mirrors that have the resolution of 1 18m mirror, and will allow astronomers even higher resolution.
So, the say it in a line: space is not the end all and be all of optical astronomy, no matter what STScI wants you to believe.
Particle physics has more immediate worries on its hands. String theory is a lot like several of the (current) developments in particle physics (ie: supersymmatry). It's elegant, and solves a bevy of problems, yet there is no experimental proof for them -yet-.
The upgrades to the Tevatron at Fermilab, and the completion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2006 will provide energy scales large enough to create and observe superpartners. (And perhaps the Higgs boson, if you're familiar with the Standard Model). On the horizon after that are are the Very LHC, or a giant linear accelerator -- then, and only then, are we going to get even close to start solving mysteries like this empiracally.
Bear in mind though, that Maxwells equations (and even Newton's) equations went unsupported for years (even almost a century) before they were widely accepted. Most of modern particle physics is young by comparision, and the energy barriers are much greater, so its not surprising there is no evidence so far.