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    Re: CN aboard a Cessna 172
    From: Hanno Ix
    Date: 2010 Feb 1, 12:14 -0800
    Frank:

    I am really surprised such a big telescope should not be much better than a 12 to 16. Isn't the amount of light energy collected by a telescope proportional to the square of the aperture size? At least that is what I would have expected. But I can follow your reasoning about resolution. Also, the stability of the mirror must be phenomenal.

    But there is also the psychological component: Seeing things as they are happening from one of the World's - and America's - great telescopes must be an unforgettable event. See, people travel for that very reason to Cape Canaveral even though they might have seen pictures and even movies about that. You just feel connected to the Universe, space and time...

    Living so close to the Palomar and never been able to look through it, pains me.

    H


    From: Frank Reed <FrankReed@HistoricalAtlas.com>
    To: NavList@fer3.com
    Sent: Sun, January 31, 2010 10:50:48 PM
    Subject: [NavList] Re: CN aboard a Cessna 172

    Hanno Ix, you wrote:
    "If they could make a small part of the time accessible to the public, I think it would give a big boost to Astronomy. "

    Well, but there's the Hubble problem. Most people alive today have grown up on highly processed, long-exposure photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and other major ground telescopes like the Keck (which most people also assume are Hubble images). But the view of, for example, the Orion Nebula through a huge telescope with a human eye as optical sensor is only slightly different from the view through a large backyard telescope. You don't get much improvement beyond about 12-16 inches aperture. This is connected with that issue we were talking about a year ago. Larger telescopes do not make extended objects brighter in terms of magnitudes per square arcminute. If you've seen the Orion Nebula through a big backyard telescope at 100x magnification, then you've seen very nearly how it would look through that giant scope on Palomar Mountain. It's even possible that a backyard telescope will provide a BETTER view of the Orion Nebula since so much design effort has gone into creating high-quality, and high-priced oculars for them. Still, large aperture DOES help resolve very faint stars and it might be nice to show people certain faint star-like objects --for example, I would love to see a Kuiper Belt Object other than Pluto with my own eyes.

    It's a nice drive and one helluva big telescope, and I enjoyed every minute of my visit.

    -FER
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