University of Arizona Begins Casting Mirrors for LSST
The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory has begun casting a new kind of giant mirror for a unique wide-field survey telescope, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). On track to see first light in 2014, the telescope will be the widest, fastest, deepest eye on the sky and will provide time-lapse digital imaging of the entire visible night sky every three days. Continuous images will be recorded every 15 seconds by a high resolution 3.2 billion-pixel camera.
Comments:
I heard about this last year. Looks like it's going forward. While the benefits are incredible, and I don't have anything bad to speak of them, but one question does come to mind. Is this the end of comet and asteroid hunting? What about supernovas in other galaxies? It's a lot of data being stored, so maybe the next frontier will be in using the data. Very interesting.<br><br>Sean
Right on, Sean-!<br><br>Right now it would appear the LSST capabilites may obsolete at least 50 percent of all current or foreseen ground based telescopes, insofar as data accumulation is concerned. <br><br>Gene
Funding Member
