SkyandTelescope.com - News Blog - Peak Picked for World's Largest Scope: "With a billion-euro price tag and a construction timetable projecting 'first light' by 2018, the world's largest optical telescope will be a monster. Its primary's mosaic of 1,000 hexagonal mirrors will create an aperture 138 feet (42 meters) across. That's a huge engineering leap: four times the diameter of the largest single-aperture optical telescopes today. To put the optics in perspective, the E-ELT's secondary mirror will be bigger than the venerable Hale Telescope's 200-inch primary."
Comment -- I have a 5-inch telescope. The ELT will be a 1,656-inch scope. They should rename it the Big Old Honkin' Scope (BOSH).
You would think that space-based telescopes would be the wave of the future, but available technology doesn't exist to put a 138-feet-in-diameter scope in orbit.
No comments:
Post a Comment