First Light from the Large Binocular Telescope!

[pokerfan]

A friend of mine worked on the adaptive optics for the project. I got to tour the mirror lab at the UA where they spun cast the massive 8.4 meter mirrors. I also got a behind the scenes tour of the MMT which is also on Mt. Graham.

http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbto/firstbinocularlight_press_release.htm#Images
">Click here for images.

This is one of the two mirrors:

[NMDemDist2]

1. sweet!! my hubby has a Binocular Telescope

but it's not that large!!

:wow:

[pokerfan]

2. Nice!

I have a 10" Dobsonian that looks kind of like this:



The cool thing about the LBT is that by applying interferometry techniques, it will have the equivalent aperture of a much larger telescope and will be capable of "nulling out" the light of a distant star allowing earth-like (terrestrial) planets to be resolved. Ten times the resolution of the Hubble and adaptive/active optics "null out" the atmospheric effects as well.

[NMDemDist2]

3. he wants another dob, a 12"er this time. His first telescope was 10" dob

he's also had an 8" Cat and a 3" and 4" reflectors.

he wants to sell these and get the 12" dob with bino eyepieces (he loves binos) and a set of Canon IS (stabilizer) binocs for spotters and wide field views

[pokerfan]

4. Sounds like a bad case of Aperture Fever

One of the guys in my club built this little baby:

http://www.runway.net/pilots/dan/welcome.html

[NMDemDist2]

6. OMG!! that's the style DOB he's wanting with the criss crossey thingies

I'm glad he's tried all kinds of styles. it's all about 'grab and go' with him so he's setting up a shed in the back yard for the new dob so he can just roll it out, slap in the EPs and go

:rofl:

[marzipanni]

5. Wondering how far the light traveled...

(from the article you linked to)
"The First Binocular Light images offer a glimpse into the LBT’s immeasurable potential. Using both LBT mirrors, these images show three false-color renditions of the spiral galaxy, NGC 2770.The galaxy lies 102 million light years from our Milky Way, and has a flat disk of stars and glowing gas, tipped slightly toward our line of sight."

I looked up light years in an attempt to understand a little better...
The distance between stars is vast. The nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri lies at a distance of 4.22 light years from us. This represents a distance of 24.8 trillion miles.
(from: http://domeofthesky.com/clicks/lightyear.html

It's truly mind-boggling!

[pokerfan]

7. Space is big

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams

I like to apply the light year to shorter distances. We have a feeling for how many seconds are in an hour, or hours in a day, days in a year. etc. So, in a nanosecond (one billionth of a second) light travels about a foot. In the time it takes your 2GHz computer to clock just once, light has traveled about six inches. It takes a little over a second for light to get from the earth to the moon and a little over eight minutes to get from the sun to the earth. It takes a over four hours for light to reach Pluto (the farthest "planet" in our solar system, but it takes over 4 years for it to reach the nearest star. It takes about 70 years for the light from the stars in the open cluster we call the Big Dipper to reach us and over 100,000 years for light to cross our galaxy from side to side. The closest real galaxy is Andromeda and it is the farthest object you can see with the naked eye. It takes over two million years for light to travel from there to here so when we look at it we see it not as it is but as it was two million years ago. The universe is over thirteen billion years old we think and so the light we see from the most distant objects has been traveling for over thirteen billion years!

Animation of the speed of light on a scale model of Earth and the Moon, about 1 1/3 seconds:

[Ellen Forradalom]

8. Lookit all those people saying

"Yeah, we are badass fucking engineers."