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SPECULOOS Project Makes Its First Observations
The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory (SSO) has been successfully installed at the Paranal Observatory and has obtained its first engineering and calibration images — a process known as first light. After finishing this commissioning phase, this new array of planet-hunting telescopes will begin scientific operations, starting in earnest in January 2019.
SSO is the core facility of a new exoplanet-hunting project called Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS), and consists of four telescopes equipped with 1-metre primary mirrors. The telescopes — named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto after the four Galilean moons of Jupiter — will enjoy pristine observing conditions at the Paranal site, which is also home to ESO's flagship Very Large Telescope (VLT). Paranal provides a near-perfect site for astronomy, with dark skies and a stable, arid climate.
These telescopes have a momentous task — SPECULOOS aims to search for potentially habitable Earth-sized planets surrounding ultra-cool stars or brown dwarfs, whose planetary populations are still mostly unexplored. Only a few exoplanets have been found orbiting such stars, and even fewer lie within their parent star's habitable zone. Even though these dim stars are hard to observe, they are abundant — comprising about 15% of the stars in the nearby universe. SPECULOOS is designed to explore 1000 such stars, including the nearest, brightest, and smallest, in search of Earth-sized habitable planets.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:25AM (1 child)
I _think_ it was the hundred inch, but possibly the Palomar two hundred inch.
Scopes that big don't need eyepieces to view planets, the passage I read said that the image of Jupiter was I think four inches across. You can just stand on a latter - or in the case of the Palomar scope, sit in the Prime Focus cage - then look at the focal plane.
But there were eight distinctly different images of Jupiter. That led to momentary panic.
The solution was to air condition the closed observatory dome during the day so as to be the same temperature as was predicted for each night at the time the slit was opened.
I think the hundred was plate glass - window glass. The Mt. Wilson Sixty was recycled wine bottles! But the Palomar scope of Corning Pyrex. Despite all manner of engineering going into the development of Pyrex, the mirror blank's annealing furnace, it's honeycombed rear side and the "floatation" mechanism on which all large mirrors rest, for mirrors that thick there is still quite significant optical degradation if the entire thickness of the mirror has a significant temperature differential.
Modern mirrors mostly use Cer-Vit - "Vitrified Ceramic". I don't know much about Cer-Vit other than that it is transparent, and that it's orange.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:30PM
> But the Palomar scope of Corning Pyrex...
The first attempt is housed at the Corning Museum of Glass [cmog.org].