It’s snowing and I’m tired and I have a pile of work to do, so here’s some stuff to gawk at on a Sunday afternoon.
1) Popular Mechanics has an article up about the Five Most Powerful Telescopes. I’m not big on the word "powerful", since telescopes are passive. They are the biggest, or can see the faintest objects, or have the best resolution. What irritates me more is that I use the word myself sometimes.
2) From FlickFilosopher comes news of this very well-done mashup:
3) HiRISE posted this image of carbonate deposits in Nili Fossae, a region where methane gas being generated was recently detected. Pretty! It’s a fault fracture in the Martian surface, with blocks of crust that have dropped down between the fault lines, and it’s also been partially flooded with sediment from a nearby crater. The carbonates may have come from liquid water mixing with some minerals in the region. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
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4) Back during the AAS meeting a couple of weeks ago, I was going to write all about my old satellites Swift and Fermi, but then Chris Lintott went and wrote up something that was pretty good. So I’ll just send you there.
January 25th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Power is the technical optical term. It is the reciprocal of the focal length. The real muddle is using power as a replacement for magnification, although focal length is in the equation for magnification.
I don’t think anyone is implying power as in energy. It’s like calling a politician or a novel powerful.
January 25th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
So the LBT has two LENSES, who knew? Thanks for that gem, Popular Mechanics.
January 25th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Regarding your tweet, I am XX and my friend who is XX read your blog – especially on SUNDAYS! I would have replied in twitter but that would not prove that I had read your blog on a Sunday. And I guess to improve the XX odds, I will go friend you on facebook. We need more XX representation in science:)
January 25th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
The Battlestar Who mash-up was cool! I really need to use my XPS for more than just gaming, blogging, and surfing. I have to talk myself into buying some quality vid-edit software first.
January 25th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hello friends…has anyone heard about this articles that was in AOL NEWS today? What do you guys think? Yay or Nay?
http://news.aol.com/article/nasas-twin-stereo-spacecraft-offer-look/316665
January 25th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
OT, but glad to hear you’ll be returning to Dragon*Con this year!
January 25th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Huh – I didn’t think there was anything at all wrong about resolution power. Isn’t it used for equivalently for microscopes?
Didn’t get the mashup, so here’s another one.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
QD, 1/focal length doesn’t really play in here. I think what PM meant was that these ‘scopes are powerful in terms of the science they can do, but it’s still not really a good way to describe them.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
BSG? Dr. Who? Who knew? Now where did I lay that fraking sonic screwdriver?
January 25th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Not too impressed by the PM article… Apart from the “lens” issue, the Europeans argue that
their VLT is the most advanced/powerful ground based optical/infrared telescope in the world. 4 x 8.2 m mirrors have more collecting area than 2 x 10 m mirrors. Plus the VLT interferometer combines beams of 3 telescopes rather than two, like Keck. The VLT operates twice as many instruments as Keck. On the other hand, Keck was the first of its class and did pioneer the segmented mirror design that both the TMT and the E-ELT will be based on. Incidentally, the
largest single aperture free-moving telescope is the GranTeCan led by Spain. The South-African SALT is even bigger, but does not have a freely moving primary mirror, so is a bit in a different category. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_reflecting_telescopes
Second, I’ve never understood the statement about the JWST being the successor to Hubble. JWST is really more a successor to Spitzer – operating entirely in the infrared. The problem is that after Hubble, there will be NO spaced-based general purpose space telescope operating at optical/visible wavelengths. Since JWST has already been sold as the Hubble “successor”, how are we ever going to get funding for a real Hubble successor?
January 25th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
That mashup has got to find its way to Con*TV. Very well done, indeed.
January 26th, 2009 at 1:44 am
There seem to be a couple of things wrong with part of the PM article about the Kepler mission:
“Fun Fact: Rather than staying in Earth orbit, Kepler will trail our home world, following it around the sun. This allows the telescope to escape the turbulence of Earth’s gravity, and keeps it off of the planetary plane, which would allow it to see farther into space without interference from the sun, the moon or the Earth. ”
What is “the turbulence of Earth’s gravity”? Maybe the gravity variations due to uneven mass distribution? Still, being in free fall no matter where it is, these are unobservable except as gravity gradients. Maybe that’s what this means, though.
If it is “following the it (Earth) around the sun” how is it “off the planetary plane”?
Regardless of what this means, it would still have part of its view affected by the presence of the sun, moon and Earth. Of course being 0.5 AU away from the Earth, by itself, would reduce the solid angle affected by the Earth and the moon.
January 26th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Loved the mashup. Just goes to prove that the genius behind BSG is really in it’s execution style. When you get down to the bones of it, the show really isn’t much more “edgy” than a lot of other TV series these days. (Although it did have some pretty diversive things to say about the “War on Terror” especially during the “New Caprica” story arc.) Some of the recent story elements date back at least to “Rocketship XM”, but the STYLE they do it in makes the whole thing very attractive.
Dr. Who, on the other hand, has been an innovator since the early 1960s. Everyone seems to lift ideas from it, from BSG to Trek. (I still consider the Borg to be a cybermen ripoff, and you could say the same for the original cylons!)
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
There’s nothing wrong with describing a “passive” tool as powerful, and the word existed well before the invention of any kind of motor or the equations that define power in scientific terms. And frankly, modern telescopes are not passive refractors and/or reflectors of light. Many dynamically change to compensate for atmospheric effects and almost all use computer processing to optimize and reinterpret the raw imaging.