Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
Thomas J. Johnson, the creator of the modern Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and the founder of Celestron, died early this morning (March 13, 2012), according to Celestron president and CEO Joe Lupica. Johnson was 89.
He ranked among the most important figures shaping the last half century of amateur astronomy.
Pentagon boffinry powerhouse DARPA has announced plans to fit a giant new US military command and control airship - known as "Blue Devil Block 2" - with through-the-air optical links offering bandwidth normally achievable only by fibre cables. This is to be done using newly-applied technology developed in the 1990s for use in astronomical telescopes.
"Psychologist, magician, and author Prof Richard Wiseman posts daily on quirky mind stuff. Based at University of Hertfordshire in the UK, but this is a personal blog."
Why and how did the Thirty Meter Telescope project decide to build at Mauna Kea?
-
TMT will also cost between 1 and 2 billion dollars when all is said and done. This is not quite at the scale of the world’s biggest science projects, like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, but it’s getting there. In fact, TMT and other proposed observatories of this generation may end up being the biggest telescopes on Earth for all time because the funding required to go even larger would more logically be directed towards putting telescopes in orbit.
-
Adaptive optics is a big part of TMT’s design. It will work both on Mauna Kea and Armazones, but astronomers expect it will work better on Mauna Kea. This is because the upper atmosphere—the part above the boundary layer—is somewhat less turbulent above Mauna Kea than it is above Armazones. Why? According to Racine it’s partly a function of latitude. Because Mauna Kea is nearer the equator it’s relatively unaffected by the jet streams that flow at higher latitutdes both north and south. Armazones’ upper atmosphere is a bit more turbulent in comparison and so somewhat harder for adaptive optics to deal with.
Personal site with various photos of camera obscura, telescope, and other optical projects/hobbies.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in optics
-
5kathryn research project;laser fiber optics
Items: 8 | Visits: 13
Created by: Kathryn H
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo