These telescopes are huge (E-ELT, OWL, VLT)

Hi,
today I will write more about telescopes. In a previous post I already mentioned why radio telescopes like Arecibo are so huge, its because of the long wavelength. Today though I will concentrate on another type of telescopes and those are the ones that sit on Earth and collect information from visible light (those are called optical telescopes).

Comparison of various telescopes. Note OWL, the big circle in the background and even bigger white Arecibo.

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I already mentioned Hubble telescope and James Webb Telescope (JWT) that is planned for launch next year. Those are in space so they have quite limited size. Down here we can build bigger ones. Right now in building phase is the E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope). Its primary mirror will have 39 meters [1] making it the largest optical telescope. It has to be so big because otherwise it could not match the ones in space. This is because we have our lovely atmosphere in the way and it makes harder for telescopes to distinquish small objects (though these days we have software that is able to account for that).

VLT aka Very Large Telescope is already working optical/infra-red telescope. It consists of 4 telescopes each of them with primary mirror of 8.2 meters in diameter. They can work together to make images of angular resolution 0.001 arcsecond. In one post I said that we are not able to take an image of star other than just point like source of light but apparently that is not true so I apologize for it:

First confirmed image of an exoplanet. The ones that we can see are bigger than Jupiter and usually quite far away from their star. Credit: Gemini Observatory

VLT is second, right behind Hubble in the amount of scientific papers that its work produced (in the field of visible light/infrared telescopes).

There are many other telscopes that I might mention in the future like Thirty Meter Telescope but I will end it with OWL – Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. It was supposed to be the largest telescope ever, with primary mirror of 100 meters! The price was estimated to be about 1.5 billion euro and because of that it was decided that its not worth it. If we do not kill ourselves we might see giants like those in the future though I have no idea how the scientists, or whoever does it, will name them (UGHT – Unimaginably Giantic Huge Telescope).

Dragallur

[1]Just as JWT, the mirror is made from smaller segments. In the case of E-ELT it is because the mirror would be too heavy and we do not have the technology to build it and in the case of JWT it is because you have to somehow get it into orbit.

Comparison of telescopes: By Cmglee – Own workiThe source code of this SVG is valid., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33613161

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Why are radio telescopes so large?

Hi,
take a Hubble telescope, it has primary mirror 2.4 meters tall. Now take this:

The giant Arecibo radio telescope

I mean the thing above which is Arecibo radio telescope has diameter of 305 meters. Both things are for the same thing, to observe the Universe.

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So the answer lies in the name. Arecibo is a RADIO telescope which means that it works on quite different wavelengths, actually magnitudes bigger wavelengths since the wavelength of for example visible light for Hubble is 550 nanometers which is quite small while radio waves can have wavelength of hundreds of meters.

This is essentially the key. If you want to see clear image in light (that we can see) you need just a small telescope. Both work the same way though from what I understand you need larger area to collect all of those waves and reflect them on the focus which is above. The equation shows it clear:

θ=1.22*λ/D

Where θ shows how close two points can be to each other without you being able to distinquish them. λ is the wavelength of the light and D is the diameter of your telescope. So you will see best when wavelength is small and diameter is huge since this will lower the angle that you are not able to distinquish. Of course that there is huge difference when you insert meters instead of nanometers so you must compensate it with the diameter of the telescope.[1]

If you want to have a clear image in radio waves, well you have to build Arecibo.. really? Isn’t there another option?

Yes there is! You can build a lot of small radio telescope that would alone be very weak but if you take lot of them you can have a Diameter of kilometers. Such a device is called interferometer which means that is “operates by myltiplying the data from each pair of telescopes together to form interference patterns”.

There is more of them and this one is ALMA observatory.

So those are huge fields or rows of smaller (even 60 meter) discs that collect data. They have to be extremely accurate what is time concerned (atomic clocks).

Dragallur

[1]1.22 is just an empirical value.

When astrology was a real thing

Hi,
it is important to distinquish the difference between astrology and astronomy. The most basic is that nowadays astrology is no longer science field.

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Today I want to talk about astrology when it was mainstream. For this to be true we have to move back few years, I want talk about renessaince, so that is about 400 years.

These days astronomy has gained a great improvement since old times. This improvement is mostly in two things: heliocentric model and first telescope.

There were couple of important people who all worked on this heliocentrism, it whole started with Copernicus, followed by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Now I want talk about Tycho and Johannes because both of them were astrologers too.

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Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe is known as one of the most or simply most precise observer. It is said that he was able to make measurements 10 times more accurate then most other people (means measurement of 1/4 of arcminute). He probably has the least credit for heliocentrims of those four guys because at one point he rejected the idea and rather made his own geo-helio centric model.

Anyway he was working on the court of Rudolf II. The Holy Roman Emperor. Not only that he was making very good measurements but he also created zodiac for the king.

While there are tons and tons of zodiacs, usually it is about the position of celestial objects. Imagine clock laid on the ecliptic. Then switch all  the numbers for the signs in zodiac. Then when planet passes in the angle which is for the zodiac you say that for example: “Mars is in the sign of Pisces”. Those are also actuall constellations on sky.

Zodiac with constellations

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler is known for his laws of planetary motion. He did not have very good eyesight so when he met with Tycho Brahe he just helped him with math and also with processing all the data that he measured, though Tycho guarded them carefully.

Kepler was also interested in astrology, actually he probably spent the same amount of time on astronomy as on astrology. He worked with Tycho also on the court of Rudolf II. who was very willing to finance their exploration.

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It took some more years for people to realise that as astrology also alchemy is not a science and is not worth of time.

Dragallur

To read more check out these pages: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Also check out this cool blog about math!

Telescope of this generation

Hi,
this title is kind of weak, I know that, but I did not want to write “rusty, old piece of metal”. First because rusty could be a little bit misleading, rust only occurs when there is oxygen and there is only little of that in space, more accurately there is 1% of all the atoms in the Universe which is quite few tons but at the same time Hubble Space Telescope is flying in near vacuum when there are just a couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, maybe in his lifespan he even touched few oxygen atoms. Second because he just does not deserve it. (Check out the post about James Webb Space Telescope)

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His lifespan? Well it has been a long for such an instrument which are usually meant to work for much less years. For now the telescope has been working for 25 years, 9 months and 29 days. It is assumed that it might work for another 20 years or so, it could be even longer but it is slowing down and as I explained in post about orbits, it will eventually fall down and burn up in atmosphere. Not that this space telescope would be half immortal or so, but it was able to work for so many years because there were actually missions to repair some of its tools and power systems, otherwise it would not work by now [1].

When Hubble was launched and first images sent to NASA they were good, but not good enough which was because of the mirror. It was polished to a little bit wrong shape so they had to repair that. Before they did it NASA used some complicated image processing to get the best out of those pictures.

The repair itself was very complicated since replacing mirror was simply impossible and to bring the telescope back was too expensive. They solved it by making the same mistake but “of opposite direction” on another part of the telescope so it was totally canceled out, you can check out on the next picture to see how much it made a difference:

 

One of the images taken during the misson for some repair.

Pillars of creation, by Hubble

NASA even decided to borrow some of Hubble’s time for amateur astronomers, of course it was not easy to get that time but it was definitely worth it I am sure.

Hubble is not justing taking those beautiful pictures but it also helped to measure Hubbles constant on whole next level and also through his data we found out that the expansion of Universe is actually increasing, phenomenon which is not well understood but most people think that it is because of dark energy.

This is monstrosity, almost all of those bright points are galaxies, galaxies which we will most probably be never able to search through.

Hubble also helped with some observations of black holes and also as you can see above, Hubble made a whole new picture of the youngest parts of Universe, so extremely far away.

How far can we actually see?[2]

Dragallur

[1]Actually it is the first such thing in space that was repaired by humans which is actually pretty cool.

[2]Check out this post to read about red shift, the x axis on the picture.

All pictures from here and here