first: Large Binocular Telescope (LBT)

Large binocular telescope to be dedicated in October 2004

September 20, 2004

Dedication ceremony in Tucson, Ariz. will unveil the world's most powerful ground-based telescope to an international audience

The LBT Corporation announced today that the dedication ceremonies for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) will be held Oct. 15. This scientific achievement will be marked by a formal dedication dinner for partners and their guests. The media is invited to attend tours of the LBT and Arizona astronomy facilities in advance of the dedication.

The $120 million LBT is located on Mount Graham near Safford, Ariz. When fully operational in 2005, it will be the most technologically advanced ground-based telescope in the world. The LBT is unlike any other telescope because it utilizes twin 8.4-meter (27.6 foot) "honeycomb" mirrors that sit on a single mount. The mirrors are more rigid and lighter weight than conventional solid-glass mirrors and together will collect more light than any existing single telescope.

In another major innovation, the telescope is also equipped with adaptive optics secondary mirrors, which correct in real time the wavefront distortion and, hence, image blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence.

This results in much sharper images and allows astronomers to see objects deeper into space. Still sharper images can be obtained by combining the light from the two primary mirrors in the so-called "interferometric imaging" mode, which will yield images of faint celestial objects that are ten times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Large binocular telescope to be dedicated in October 2004

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second: Very Large Telescope (VLT)

SINFONI Opens With Upbeat Chords

The European Southern Observatory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany) and the Nederlandse Onderzoekschool Voor Astronomie (Leiden, The Netherlands), and with them all European astronomers, are celebrating the successful accomplishment of "First Light" for the Adaptive Optics (AO) assisted SINFONI ("Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observation in the Near-Infrared") instrument, just installed on ESO's Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory (Chile).

This is the first facility of its type ever installed on an 8-m class telescope, now providing exceptional observing capabilities for the imaging and spectroscopic studies of very complex sky regions, e.g. stellar nurseries and black-hole environments, also in distant galaxies.

Following smooth assembly at the 8.2-m VLT Yepun telescope of SINFONI's two parts, the Adaptive Optics Module that feeds the SPIFFI spectrograph, the "First Light" spectrum of a bright star was recorded with SINFONI in the early evening of July 9, 2004.

SINFONI Opens With Upbeat Chords

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third Germany :)

S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

thanks Sir Ulli this is a very interesting science report Very Best Wishes-byron