Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Well, sorta. Time-lapse films of two observatories showing some gorgeous skies and really neat telescope movement.

Australia:


Chile:


http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/time-lapse-video-very-large-telescope-work-coolest-thing-youll-see-today

3000 degrees F!

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07252/815920-85.stm

Good ol' liquid nitrogen! My wife has done this on occasion, I hope to do it someday.

http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/index.cgi?page_name=make_ice_cream_like_a_mad_scientist;action=display;category=Live

This is a very cool project. If I won a lottery I'd gladly give them money for this!

For most of the history of astronomy from when photography came around up to and including today, glass plates and film have been used to record observations. Pluto was discovered by using a device called a blink comparator where you mount two glass plates taken of the same star field a few months (or years) apart, look through one eyepiece, and press a button. Every time you press it, it flips a mirror between the plates. If you see any movemement, it might be a planet. Black & white photography is a great way to do this: you develop the film, and the bright things that you shot are black, so it's quite easy to see what represents stars and what is just empty space.

(the blink comparator, the Pluto plates, and the telescope used by Clyde Tombaugh are on display at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ)

This project is especially cool because it includes sky surveys from both the northern and southern hemispheres for over a century!

The collection weighs 165 TONS and contains more than a petabyte of data (a petabyte is the next increment above terabyte which is the increment above gigabyte). And it's an original with no backups. I hope they get fundage soon!

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/217218 It's really amazing how they're going about doing this, I would love to see the camera and software that they're using! And I think Russet worked at the observatory mentioned in the article, but I'm not sure.

(try http:/www.bugmenot.com for an already registered free NYT login)

There is a type of telescope called an LMT -- Liquid Mirror Telescope. It has a giant dish with a reflective fluid, mercury has been used in the past, that rotates. The motion causes the liquid to form a parabola, thus you have a telescope mirror. There's all sorts of technical problems regarding smoothness of motion, lack of vibration, etc, but it works. The biggest hitch is that it can pretty much only point in one direction -- straight up.

Well, a scientist at University of Arizona is proposing building a 100 meter LMT on the moon! No atmospheric interference, low gravity simplifies all sorts of things. Of course, your shipping costs are kinda steep. The proposal is to make two prototypes on the moon, scaling up to the 100 meter model.

I think this would be tremendously cool if it ever gets built, but I'm not holding my breath.

I've read about this before as there is/was a LMT installation about three miles from Cloudcroft. It was used by NASA to catalog orbital debris and was de-commissioned and the telescope shipped off to other parts, theoretically the facility has been re-opened and houses a new spiffy one-meter, but I haven't seen it yet.

http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2007/05/liquid_telescope