jpeg,
53kIn May 1997 I visited the island of La Palma and of course I took the chance to climb Roque de los Muchachos to see the famous, widespread observatory on top of it.
Among the large telescopes which were hidden behind their domes, I found several interesting multi-mirror systems standing uncovered under the deep, blue sky. The overall diameter of their combined mirror was about 3 meters.
jpeg,
53kA total of 32 single mirrors, measuring 18 inches each, were mounted on a large "dobsonian"-platform . I took dozens of pictures with a larger project in mind (somewere in the future). The telescopes are looking for radiation of showers of particles, resulting when a ray of cosmic particles of high energy strikes the earth's atmosphere. The instruments are operated from MPI-Garching near Munich, Germany. Here are very interesting animations of such events.
jpeg,
46k
jpeg,
61k
jpeg,
57k
jpeg,
81kMuch interesting information about ESO's Very Large Telescope .
Information about the planed European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT)
Many large telescopes are concentrated on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii:
The largest optical telescope is the GranTeCan of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma
Visit the homesite of the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) an entirely automatic telescope dedicated for the search for supernovae.
The very exciting Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is currently under development. LSST will cover the available sky every three nights.
Comments welcome, contact:
