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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 14 2018, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the psyched-they're-synched dept.

ESO's Very Large Telescope has combined the light from all four of its Unit Telescopes into its ESPRESSO instrument for the first time, effectively creating a 16 meter aperture optical telescope:

The ESPRESSO instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile has for the first time been used to combine light from all four of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes. Combining light from the Unit Telescopes in this way makes the VLT the largest optical telescope in existence in terms of collecting area.

One of the original design goals of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) was for its four Unit Telescopes (UTs) to work together to create a single giant telescope. With the first light of the ESPRESSO spectrograph using the four-Unit-Telescope mode of the VLT, this milestone has now been reached.

After extensive preparations by the ESPRESSO consortium (led by the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva, with the participation of research centres from Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland) and ESO staff, ESO's Director General Xavier Barcons initiated this historic astronomical observation with the push of a button in the control room.

[...] Light from the four Unit Telescopes is routinely brought together in the VLT Interferometer for the study of extremely fine detail in comparatively bright objects. But interferometry, which combines the beams "coherently", cannot exploit the huge light-gathering potential of the combined telescopes to study faint objects.

Previously: First Light for VLT's ESPRESSO Exoplanet Hunter


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:30PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:30PM (#637852)

    As fine controls improve, the swarm of mirror-sats reflecting light onto a sensor-and-analyzer center sat starts to make a lot more sense than the massively costly and risky business of the Webb.
    Serviceability and upgrades would be a lot better too: just switch the sat at the focal point for an upgraded one every decade, without having to relaunch the mirror array (or vice versa).

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