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 | | GEORGE ELLERY HALE |
| USA (1868 - 1938) | George Ellery Hale was an American solar astronomer, born in Chicago. He was educated at MIT, at the Observatory of Harvard College, (1889-90), and at Berlin (1893-94). As an undergraduate at MIT, he invented the spectroheliograph, with which he made his discoveries of the solar vortices and magnetic fields of sun spots. | | |
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Disfrute estos perspicaces y educacionales videoclips obtenidos de más de 70 horas de entrevistas con las más notables figuras en astronomía tomadas durante la filmación del documental 400 Años del Telescopio.
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Adaptive vs. active optics at Keck
Taft E. Armandroff
- W. M. Keck Observatory
Active optics compensate for slowly varying influences on the telescope optical system, so the mirrors and the mechanical systems that hold the mirrors into place. So these change rather slowly over the course of the night with the direction of telescopes pointed or with temperature.
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Active optics compensate for slowly varying influences on the telescope optical system, so the mirrors and the mechanical systems that hold the mirrors into place. So these change rather slowly over the course of the night with the direction of telescopes pointed or with temperature.
Adaptive optics is more breakthrough and really removes the effect that for all of our astronomical history has hampered astronomers. The effect of blurring from turbulent motions in our atmosphere and it compensates in a much more rapid dynamic timescale, two thousand times a second, to overcome the blurring effects of the atmosphere to make sure the stars don’t twinkle.
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Keck telescopes overview
Taft E. Armandroff
- W. M. Keck Observatory
The Keck telescopes are the two largest fully stirrable optical infrared telescopes in the world. They were the first of the new generation of large telescopes.
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Well the Keck telescopes are the two largest fully stirrable optical infrared telescopes in the world. They were the first of the new generation of large telescopes. They pioneered the use of segmented mirror technology which got us on the air sooner doing science than the monolithic mirror telescopes. We have also been extremely active in using adaptive optics to compensate for the blurring effects of the atmosphere and we have gotten images regularly that have more than twice to four times the resolution of the Hubble space telescope opening up whole new science areas for our community. We are now doing laser guide star adaptive optics that lets us do adaptive optics anywhere in the sky without the need for a bright natural guide star. This is being applied to a wide variety of problems from the black hole of the galactic center to planets around nearby stars, to the most distant galaxies in the universe.
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Astronomy answers at Keck
Taft E. Armandroff
- W. M. Keck Observatory
How do stars form and evolve? How does the galaxy form and evolve nearby galaxies? What are the real influences? What makes one galaxy a spiral and another an elliptical? What makes one star live a hundred thousand years and another live sixteen billion years?
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Well, it is extremely exciting to work on the big questions in astronomy. How does stars form and evolve? How does the galaxy form and evolve nearby galaxies? What are the real influences? What makes one galaxy a spiral and another an elliptical? What makes one star live a hundred thousand years and another live sixteen billion years? And many of these questions we’re actually finding out for the first time over the time period of my career. And I think all of us here at Keck observatory are thrilled that we can actually make a contribution to this. We are a fairly small organization and everybody makes a contribution to answering these questions. So it’s not only the scientists who are writing the papers, but it’s the electronic engineers who are developing the instruments, the mechanical engineers who keep the telescopes aligned, the technicians who keep it working every night so that the astronomers can use it on their targets and build up the signals. So it’s a wonderful team effort, and we all feel privileged.
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Segmented mirror technology
Taft E. Armandroff
- W. M. Keck Observatory
Jerry Nelson developed a revolutionary technique for instead of having one mirror as all telescopes had before Keck and following the prescription of say, the classic telescopes like the Palomar 200 inch, the Mt. Wilson 100 inch, and the Kitt Peak and Cerra Tololo four meters to make it much more achievable in terms of issues like weight, in terms of cost to break the mirror into segments.
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Well Jerry Nelson developed a revolutionary technique for instead of having one mirror as all telescopes had before Keck and following the prescription of say, the classic telescopes like the Palomar 200 inch, the Mt. Wilson 100 inch, and the Kitt Peak and Cerra Tololo four meters to make it much more achievable in terms of issues like weight, in terms of cost to break the mirror into segments. And this is revolutionary technology that wasn’t uniformly embraced by the community, and it took Jerry’s determination and his teams widely testing all of the concepts, and the support of the Keck foundation to really demonstrate this technology. And I don’t think it was really until we got the first images with the telescope that people fully bought into the technology. Now, it’s fully embraced, it is being used in other telescope projects currently and it’s thought to be the best technology for the 30 meter telescopes. So we are really pleased with the role Keck has played not only in the science, but also in the technologic revolution of telescopes.
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The 30-meter telescope
Taft E. Armandroff
- W. M. Keck Observatory
The 30-meter telescope plans to use segmented mirror technology just like Keck, and between Keck and 30 meter telescope we have a great interchange of technical knowledge on topics like controls systems, for keeping the mirrors precisely positioned, working on illuminizing the segments and adaptive optic systems.
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The 30 meter telescope plans to use segmented mirror technology just like Keck, and between Keck and 30 meter telescope we have a great interchange of technical knowledge on topics like controls systems, for keeping the mirrors precisely positioned, working on illuminizing the segments and adaptive optic systems. So we very much view this next generation of telescopes, particularly the 30 meter telescope, as the next chain in the evolution of the telescope.
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