on early Wednesday morning,
to watch a full lunar eclipse, for us in Thailand and the Far East it will
be around 6.00 this
Wednesday evening to
view this phenomenon, the only slight problem is that as I write this it
is totally overcast and actually raining, but telescope to the ready,
speaking of which I am sure we have all heard of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has brought us astonishing pictures of space before like this one titled 'Mystic Mountain',
well as some one once said, 'you ain't seen nothing yet', as
work on the first of 7 giant mirrors has been finished for the largest astronomical mirror ever made, the mirror will be part of the
25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope, some of the facts of which are mind blowing,
scientists at the University of
Arizona and in California have completed the most challenging large astronomical
mirror ever made, for the past several years, a group of optical scientists and
engineers working at the UA Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory underneath
the UA’s football stadium have been polishing an 8.4-meter (27 ½ feet) diameter
mirror with an unusual, highly asymmetric shape,
by the standards used by optical scientists, the “degree of
difficulty” for this mirror is 10 times that of any previous large telescope
mirror, the mirror surface matches the desired prescription to a precision of
19 nanometers – so smooth that if it were the size of the continental U.S., the
highest mountains would be little more than a half-inch high!
this mirror, and
six more like it, will form the heart of the Giant Magellan Telescope
(GMT), providing more than 380 square meters, or 4,000 square feet, of
light-collecting area, the Giant Magellan Telescope will lead a next generation
of giant telescopes that will explore planets around other stars and the
formation of stars, galaxies and black holes in the early universe,
the mirror was cast at the mirror lab from 20 tons of
glass, melted in a rotating furnace until it flowed into a honeycomb mold, once
the glass had cooled and the mold material was removed, scientists at the lab
used a series of fine abrasives to polish the mirror, checking its figure
regularly using a number of precision optical tests, the mirror has an
unconventional shape because it is part of what ultimately will be a single
25-meter (82 feet) optical surface composed of seven circular segments, each
8.4 meters (27 ½ feet) in diameter,
the Giant Magellan Telescope will be located on a remote
mountaintop in the Chilean Andes where the skies are clear and dark, far from
any sources of light pollution, at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las
Campanas Observatory in northern Chile, earthmovers are completing the removal
of 4 million cubic feet of rock to produce a flat platform for the telescope
and its supporting buildings, it is thought that the new telescope will bring
us images 8 times more detailed than is possible with the Hubble
telescope, it is almost impossible to imagine what wonders this giant telescope
will bring us when it is completed in hopefully 2020.
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