E-ELT goes to Chile April 27, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 1 comment so far
As expected, ESO Council have accepted the recommendation to build the European Extremely Large Telescope at Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes. The decision was announced yesterday with the customary nice words and some cool accompanying imagery, video and a dedicated ESOCast episode, which you can all see here.
Particularly noteworthy is the nod of thanks ESO give to Spain, who were competing with Chile for the chance to to host the telescope. While many European astronomers, especially the Britons who’ve traditionally had the largest foreign presence on the island, have a great big soft spot for La Palma, I think a collective sigh of relief went through the community on hearing the news. La Palma is undoubtedly an excellent observing site, but it’s just not of the same quality as Paranal or Armazones – it’s more humid, has fewer clear nights and is plagued by Saharan sand in its atmosphere.
With this announcement, all three of the ELT-type telescopes – E-ELT, GMT and TMT – now have a home. Now all they need is money to start building!
Image: ESO/S. Brunier
Making my software open April 6, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me . 5comments
After thinking about software development in astronomy and talking about it with friends at work and on this blog, I thought it was about time I put my money where my mouth is. I too write software – in fact, the bulk of my work here in Leiden has been based around code I’ve written over the past 2 years for the METIS project (in IDL). The code basically calculates the sensitivity of METIS on the E-ELT, or the minimum flux it will be able to detect at a particular signal to noise (S/N) in a given exposure time over its wavelength range, in various modes of observation. You can find the full package with background info on my brand-new github page, and a paper is in preparation (to be presented at SPIE 2010) for your referencing pleasure.
With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT March 4, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 3comments
Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)
ESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.
So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.
What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . 1 comment so farThis week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
Adventures in ELT Wonderland August 26, 2009
Posted by sarah in: politics, science . 1 comment so far
Snazzy artist's rendering of the E-ELT, VLT and the Atomium
Optical and infrared observations are the bread and butter of astronomy. For thousands of years the earliest scientists were inspired by the light coming from the sun and the night sky, the light they could see with the unaided eye. These observations have shaped our vision of the world throughout history. Using modern telescopes we can see far beyond the wavelengths visible to the naked eye, catching the photons from the most distant known objects in the Universe, from radio waves through to the most energetic gamma rays. But it’s optical and infrared images, like those produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, that still prove the most inspiring to many scientists and the public.
For the past 2 years I’ve been involved in the planning of the next generation of optical/IR observatories, the European Extremely Large Telescope or E-ELT. Specifically, I work on the design of a potential instrument for this mammoth of a telescope, whose 42-m primary mirror diameter will be four times larger than the largest optical telescopes in the world today. Previous generations of telescopes have always seen an approximate doubling of mirror size, and this new generation of observatories signal an important departure from this trend – a hugely ambitious endeavour by all accounts.
