agenda

Astro Unit 6 Telescopes

Midnight..... by Robert W. Burnham Jr., 1978 There is no sound in the forest - only the phantom murmur of the far wind and the wind's shadow drifting as smoke through ebon branches; there a single star glistens in the heart of night.... A star! Look skyward now... and see above...Infinity! Vast and dark and deep and endless....your heritage: Silent clouds of stars, Other worlds uncountable and other suns beyond numbering and realms of fire-mist and star-cities as grains of sand.... drifting... Across the void.... Across the gulf of night.... Across the endless rain of years.... Across the ages. Listen! Were you the star-born you should hear That silent music of which the ancient sages spoke Though in silent words... Here then is our quest and our world and our Home.	The Green Bank Telescope, the largest steerable single dish radio telescope in the world.
The design for the 30m telescope. No, I'm not kidding....$300 million for the world's biggest eye: http://www.tmt.org/	Telescope and E.T. links How to buy a telescope Telescope types Adaptive optics Orion Telescope - a commercial site but loaded with good telescope info! What is radio astronomy all about? How do radio telescopes work? The VLA - an interferometer in action The Pioneer plaque decoded SETI at Home The WOW Signal The Arecibo ET message decoded Sounds of Earth - from the Voyager record Sounds of Pulsars Unsharp masking techniques
Multiwavelength Astronomy Gallery What's Up? Two teams of astronomers announced recently that they had photographed exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. The two press release images are at right and below right: Sky Online astro news	The view of Fomalhaut (masked by a coronagraph) showing the new planet embedded within a dusty disc (inset). See the annotated full-resolution image here. Credit: NASA, ESA and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley,)
Reading Topics: Types of telescopes Powers of telescopes Hubble Space Telescope Radio telescopes Interferometry Space telescopes, multiwavelength	Text pages: White Black 74-79 80-84 79-82 84-86 84-85 89 89-91 91-94 91-93 94-96 93-99 96-101
Other links of interest: ALMA - a future radio interferometer NRAO - an awesome web site! Play the NRAO video. Keck Gemini The LBT- currently, the world's biggest telescope! Hubble's Successor: The Webb Telescope Making giant telescope mirrors - Steward Mirror Lab At right: Three exoplanets orbiting a young star 140 light years away are captured using Keck Observatory near-infrared adaptive optics. The planets are labeled and the two outer ones have arrows showing the size of their motion over a 4 year period.	Credit: Christian Marois and Bruce Macintosh