![]() On the best mountaintops seeing can be 0.3 arcseconds which results in a hundredfold gain.) Four times Hale built the largest telescope in the world: the 40-inch refractor at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and the 60-and 100-inch reflectors at Mt. (When observing point-like objects, sensitivity improves as the point-spread function squared. After starting the first Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, Hale took astronomy to the mountains of California where the seeing (image quality) is much better. George Ellery Hale, the MIT-educated solar-physicist, was the pre-eminent telescope builder of the 20th century. Newton made a few other contributions relevant to astronomy including his invention of the fields of gravitational physics and spectroscopy. The introduction of the reflecting telescope by Newton in 1669 paved the way to virtually all modern telescopes. The sheer weight of a large glass lens makes a refracting telescope larger than about a 1 meter in diameter impractical. The telescope Galileo used was a simple refractor. Galileo was not only the first physicist to turn a telescope to the sky, but the telescope and microscope were the first instruments of science that extended our ability to explore the physical world. ![]() These new and more powerful eyes have continued to deliver stunning discoveries.īecause physicists have contributed so significantly to the improvement of the performance of “our eyes on the Universe” and in shaping the science of astrophysics, it is appropriate that our Society take part in the celebration of this anniversary (the International Year of Astronomy) through the theme–New Eyes on the Universe: 400 years of telescopes–and content of the April Meeting. Since then, the sensitivity of optical telescopes has improved by another factor of 100 million, and we have added radio, infrared, UV, x-ray, gamma-ray, cosmic-ray, and neutrino eyes on the Universe. His discoveries, including the phases of Venus and the resolution of the Milky Way into stars, established the Copernican paradigm and profoundly changed our view of the Universe. The Hubble was saved and was actually producing images better than we had publicly predicted.Four-hundred years ago Galileo turned a 2-cm telescope to the sky and increased the sensitivity of human eyes on the Universe by a factor of 100–an increase only matched since by that of the Hubble Space Telescope. A backup imaging camera was installed that had the correction figured into the internal mirrors that were already part of its design. This box was altered to house a set of mirrors that would correct the convergent light beam coming from the flawed primary mirror so it would reach the scientific instruments in pristine condition. An empty instrument box had been made before the 1990 launch to be used in case one of the scientific instruments was not ready in time. The scientific instruments were housed in easily changed-out boxes. That success reflected the finest hours (years actually) of NASA and Aerospace engineers and managers, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Astronaut Corps. STScIĪnd improve they did with the servicing mission of December 1993. Over the next several years the articles on the Hubble changed from the initial subjects of “how can such a major screw-up occur,” to lead-ins of “the crippled Hubble has shown this interesting scientific result,” until finally the science stories would simply end with a mention in the last paragraph that the Hubble was working with a flawed mirror, but it was expected that things would be improved after the first servicing mission.Īstronauts remove the Wide Field and Planetary Camera to replace it with its more powerful successor, Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, during Hubble’s first servicing mission in 1993. However, researchers developed computer programs to accurately remove the halo and the scientific value of the resulting images began to be appreciated. We were pilloried, investigated, and a subject of mean-spirited cartoons. Instead of a single sharp core where 90% of the light focused, there was a sharp core with 20% of the light surrounded by a halo. ![]() That error resulted in a mirror that formed a degraded image. The telescope’s primary mirror had been created with great precision and measured with unprecedented accuracy but the measuring equipment was misaligned. Within a few weeks it looked like those early skeptics were the wise ones amongst us. Persson (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)/Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Bumpy ride at first Compare with a ground-based picture from Las Campanas, Chile, Observatory of the same region of the sky. On the right is part of the first image taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field/Planetary Camera.
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