Adaptive Optics, Tracking the SOTA for ground-based observation Options

[JRehling]

Here, as mentioned in the Neptune thread, is a link to an article about the PALM-3000 system working with the 5m Hale Telescope. The attached photo of Ganymede is one of the best ground-based images I've ever seen, and easily blows away HST resolution.

http://inspirehep.net/record/1252803/plots

Attached image(s)

 

[algorimancer]

Thanks for posting. That is crazy impressive resolution

What ever happened to the promise of optical interferometry, with multiple telescopes separated by large distances to emulate the performance of a larger scope? We had Keck II, which did some impressive work, but that was more of a pilot project for the larger plans.

[JRehling]

What ever happened to the promise of optical interferometry, with multiple telescopes separated by large distances to emulate the performance of a larger scope? We had Keck II, which did some impressive work, but that was more of a pilot project for the larger plans.

Definitely the preeminent telescope of the future is the E-ELT, which will have a 39-meter composite mirror. You could think of that as multiple telescopes separated by a distance, but with extra telescopes filling in all the space between them! If that can deliver an 8x improvement on the resolution in the Ganymede photo that I posted, as it should, it'll as big of an advance over existing telescopes than the HST was over what came before it.

I'm not sure why the architecture that you mention has not been advanced, but there was a great article in SiAm last year…

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/...from-yesterday/

…about the very acrimonious and political battle to develop the world's next biggest telescopes that was a bitter fight over resources and ended up not with one big winner, nor two, but three roughly equal rivals. As the article mentions, a unified community would probably have given the world a single massive telescope many years earlier. That's the downside. The upside is that we'll probably have two of them a decade from now, and that doubles the number of observations. (The third, TMT, is in limbo due to even different political reasons, but we may have three massive telescopes 15 or 20 years from now???)

Given the intense struggle and animosity, it's likely that many worthwhile projects have been stalled by the fierce competition for resources.

The world's biggest radio telescope has also been built, in China. There's no doubt we're on the cusp of a new golden age of telescopes, and many breakthroughs are inevitably to follow.

Personally, I'm most excited about the visual observation of exoplanets within 50-100 light years, but it's also sure to mean breakthrough observations of objects as close as the asteroid belt and as far as the cosmological scale.