There's more than one observatory in our area. There's my wife's observatory,
Apache Point Observatory (APO), there's the
National Solar Observatory (NSO) just down the road from Apache Point, and there was a
liquid mirror telescope (LMT) just three miles outside of Cloudcroft. Apache Point is the only traditional observatories, i.e. recognizable telescopes and operating at night.
The LMT is really cool technology. It doesn't have a conventional glass mirror, instead they have a pool of liquid mercury that they spin, and the spinning motion bows the mercury pool into an effective mirror. They've worked with other chemicals to see what other characteristics might manifest. The only problem with this (aside from massive amounts of mercury being present) is that it can basically only point straight up. It can deviate a few degrees, but really not too much.
The LMT facility was shut down in 2002, the LMT was moved to another facility and other scientific instruments went elsewhere. When it was in operation, it was used to monitor and catalog orbital debris, there's an unbelievable amount of crap in orbit and it's important to know where it is.
Of course there's more to the story, or I wouldn't have much of a post!
( Read more... )
