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Space Geeks

Last night we went up to the Lick Observatory for a tour and a look through the scope. I learned:

  • Observatory volunteers are very sweet and enthusiastic, but have very bad hair.
  • adaptive optics is just about the coolest thing imaginable. This makes image processing look like banging two rocks together. Using it, they've been able to surpass the image quality of Hubble using ground-based scopes, which is very impressive.
  • Size does matter. The Lick telescope (36") is too small to be useful anymore, which I find very sad, because it's a beautiful old instrument, kind of Terry Gilliam-esque. Lick now has the Shane scope (120") which is more useful, although still not as useful as Keck in Hawaii (10m). And they're trying right now to scrape up the $600M they need for CELT, which would be a 30m telescope based, um, somewhere.
  • The world of astronomy is filled with hilarious acronyms like ESO's plans to build OWL ("Overwhelmingly Large Telescope").


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