Skip to main content

Telescope Time Lapse



These are the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescopes (VLT). Each of the four large telescopes has an 8.2 meter (diameter) primary mirror, and they can be used individually, or they can be combined together to form a much larger telescope through a process called interferometry.

This video also shows the wonders of the Southern Sky. As our Aussie readers can attest, there is a much higher density of stars visible south of the equator owing to the orientation of the Earth relative to the Galactic plane. I've observed once on the Magellan telescopes at Las Companas, Chile, and I can't wait to go back one day soon.

The orange streak emanating from one of the telescopes at 2:44 is the laser guide star adaptive optics system. The laser excites sodium atoms in the atmosphere and forms a fake star above the telescope. The light emitted from this fake star traverses back down through the atmosphere and a sensor on the telescope measures the deviation of the light from a perfect point. Basically, by sensing the twinkling of the fake star, the telescope's camera can adjust its mirror to compensate for the ripples in the atmosphere and form nice, sharp images. There's a laser system like this on Keck, and just last week the Robo-AO laser system was tested successfully at Palomar on the 1.5-meter (60-inch) telescope (see image below).

Comments

Anonymous said…
No wonder telescope time was a huge part of your job negotiations. Wow.

Popular posts from this blog

back-talk begins

me: "owen, come here. it's time to get a new diaper" him, sprinting down the hall with no pants on: "forget about it!" he's quoting benny the rabbit, a short-lived sesame street character who happens to be in his favorite "count with me" video. i'm turning my head, trying not to let him see me laugh, because his use and tone with the phrase are so spot-on.

The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke  which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims. I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to d

Reader Feedback: Whither Kanake in (white) Astronomy?

Watching the way that the debate about the TMT has come into our field has angered and saddened me so much. Outward blatant racism and then deflecting and defending. I don't want to post this because I am a chicken and fairly vulnerable given my status as a postdoc (Editor's note: How sad is it that our young astronomers feel afraid to speak out on this issue? This should make clear the power dynamics at play in this debate) .  But I thought the number crunching I did might be useful for those on the fence. I wanted to see how badly astronomy itself is failing Native Hawaiians. I'm not trying to get into all of the racist infrastructure that has created an underclass on Hawaii, but if we are going to argue about "well it wasn't astronomers who did it," we should be able to back that assertion with numbers. Having tried to do so, well I think the argument has no standing. At all.  Based on my research, it looks like there are about 1400 jobs in Hawaii r