Touring a Giant
Image credit: NASA
The W.M. Keck Observatory, perched over two and a half miles up on the summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, is home to an arsenal of cutting-edge astronomical instruments. The most familiar: Keck I and Keck II, the world’s largest optical and infared telescopes.
Each houses a mammoth 10 meters (33 feet) of aperture, composed of 36 hexagonal 1.8-meter mirror segments which function in unison (with tremendous precision) as a single surface. Via interferometry, the combined light collected by Keck I and II provide resolving power equivalent to a single 85-meter telescope, 8.5 times greater than their individual apertures. The result? The most powerful optical telescope system on the planet. The Keck Interferometer serves as a ground-based component of NASA’s PlanetQuest.
Want to take a look behind the scenes? Take this virtual tour of the Keck facilities — complete with 360° panoramic views inside and outside the observatory and video for each of the 11 stops, from the summit itself to the control room.
Very cool.
4 Responses to “Touring a Giant”
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I would love to go there. Last year when I was hanging out all night with an AA who was hunting asteroids, he told me about his trip there. So many rules about what you can drive up there, what you can do, etc., etc. It would be truly awe-inspiring to look through those telescopes.
There’s something very romantic about observatories; their unusual shape, their isolation..the closest thing to being in a spaceship without leaving the ground.
Really, today there is great need to install number of such big observatories so that output will be more for receiving the inormous information from the sky. what will be benefit if the same has install on the moon’s surface to observe, and monitor from earth. is it possible. and what will be the more difference in getting images on the screens.
sunil
Hehe, I’d be perfectly happy just standing on the summit by the domes.
Looks like a great place for a picnic.
I’m sure it would be a nice place for a picnic, but c’mon Wolverine, standing by the domes and not looking through the scopes? That would be like putting a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in front of me and saying, “But you can’t eat it.” No chance…if I’m going to go to the summit, I’m going to go all the way. 36″ is the biggest I’ve looked through, and that’s pretty cool, now Keck would be the ultimate cool.
But it will more than likely never happen anyway.