Tag Archives: telescope

New telescope technologies, new visions

Impact: Scientific Instruments    June 24, 2010
Looking at the sky with telescopes sitting on the Earth is like looking through a somewhat primitive and dirty window. That hasn’t stopped astronomers from wanting and sometimes getting bigger and better optical telescopes. Even a somewhat distorted window on the universe is far better than human eyesight. Then along came rockets and eventually it [...]
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VISTA gets down to work

News: Scientific Instruments    December 13, 2009
No, not Vista the operating system. This is the newest and biggest telescope on Earth: VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy). Its size (the main mirror is 4.1 meters across), bulk (the camera alone weighs 3 tons) and power (16 special detectors for infrared light with a total of 67 million pixels of [...]
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New telescope finds planet near Sun-like star

News: Scientific Instruments    December 5, 2009
The search for planets other than those in our own solar system (exoplanets) has been going on since the early 1990’s. Most of the searches and discovery of planets have been done by indirect means, for example, catching the shadow of a planet as it transits the local star, or detecting the perturbation in the [...]
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