Taking a look at the next generation of telescopes
arstechnica.com30 points by voxadam 19 days ago
30 points by voxadam 19 days ago
This article has surprisingly little substance, given its title.
They might as well have just said:
There are three large telescopes in the works in different parts of the world. Here's a picture of one of them.
I'd like to know more about that solitary picture. How far away was the camera, and what lens was used?
There's a similar full moon rising shot I've been dying to shoot in my home town, but there's no safe place to set up with a lens long enough to have the moon's size be impressive. Wide angle shots to establish location with the moon leaves the moon a tiny size in the image. Telephotos zoom in past the interesting scenery unless moved far enough away--the longer the lens the further away. My current plan is a big drone to support the lens but the location puts me closer to a highway than I'd like to fly a drone. Oh well, I can see it in my mind's eye
Looks like around 1000mm full frame equivalent. You could do it with a kit lens and teleconverter or get a cheap catadiotropic lens.
It's a little unfortunate too, there's lots of interesting things happening with the commercial space boom. Companies like observable.space are out there making incredible advancements with both software and hardware - you can task these giant systems now via api.
That’s because it’s part of a series called Tuesday Telescope where it often features a photo of some corner of the sky. Take a look at previous posts. Magnificent photos. It is not a technical report of the telescope. As described right on top of the article:
Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
So a typical Next Generation article.
Eric Berger has a frustratingly amateur perspective on his subjects. "Telescope" is incredibly vague. It's like saying "New computers in development" when referring to supercomputers in China and the US. For someone who's spent so much time on these subjects, he never has more than a surface level understanding of anything related to aerospace or astronomy. Compare to a guy like Bill Sweetman who writes with extraordinary detail on aviation despite never being an engineer himself.
These are just the optical telescopes. There are also next-generation radio telescopes in the works, such as the DSA-2000:
https://www.deepsynoptic.org/overview
The most cutting-edge radio telescopes are arrays, which means hundreds or thousands of similar-looking dishes, typically spread out miles apart. The DSA-2000 will be in the Nevada desert, similar to how the VLA was built in the New Mexico desert.
. . . where "miles apart" includes radio telescope clusters grouped on opposing sides of the planet linked by high speed fibre optics.
It would have been cool if they gave more technical details like it's active optics and stuff.
I'm currently cutting some 6" mirror blanks and hoping to eventually make an 18" mirror (have to cut and fuse the blank).
>>> ...the United States, is building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will have a primary diameter of 25.4 meters....
Last laugh for US units of measure.
What are the competitors to the European Telescope?
If you were disappointed in the brevity of the article, you may enjoy this multi hour podcast on the ELT, in the form of an interview between one of the scientists working on it and a German CS PhD / podcaster: https://omegataupodcast.net/150-the-european-extremely-large...
They get into the details of the active & adaptive optics, flagship science missions, engineering tradeoffs, etc. The podcast itself is also free and non commercial, so no ads or sponsors!