Vista telescope takes stunning images

[glenc]

UK's Vista telescope takes stunning images of space.

The first images have been revealed from a telescope that can map the sky much faster and deeper than any other...

It is based at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile...

Vista also has a large field of view, and can cover wide areas of sky quickly - each of its images captures an area of sky about ten times as large as the full Moon...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8407834.stm
http://www.vista.ac.uk/

[glenc]

As an illustration of the power of the VISTA telescope we start with a visible light view of the Flame Nebula created from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. We then slowly fade into the much more detailed infrared view taken with VISTA and see through most of the thick dust clouds to reveal the cluster of very hot and young stars at its heart.
We then swing around and repeat the same steps on the Horsehead Nebula and the nearby reflection nebula NGC 2023.
http://www.eso.org/gallery/v/Videos/Nebulae/vid-49h-09_FLASH.flv.html

[strongmanmike]

Wow what a scope :eyepop:

An automated 4m aperture F3.25 RC with active optics providing 1/2 arc sec imaging resolution over a 1.6deg wide FOV, on its own mountain peak, under the darkest skies in the world, at 24degS latitude (so it can see well into the Northern sky)..... is this the ultimate telescope in service today?

Makes our 1.3m Sky Mapper seem a bit lame :sadeyes:

Mike

[renormalised]

Only because the nobs, known as politicians (and business), out here won't spend money on scientific research...and haven't been for many years. They sometimes surprise us with token gestures but it's not very often you see big science being funded. Unless, of course, they can see a profit in it.

Pity we have no input into the project.

[gary]

Hi Glen,

Thanks for the post and great to see this new scope delivering fabulous
information already.

Quite a few discoveries will be made on the survey images alone.

Speaking recently with a friend who is a fellow engineer at the AAT, I was
heartened to learn that the Australian Government announced in July this year that
it was providing AUD88.4 million to help fund the 25m Giant Magellan
Telescope (GMT) which will also be sited in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
See story here - http://www.physorg.com/news168008369.html

So Australia is now part of a consortium designing and building the world's
largest telescope. :thumbsup:

Hopefully the survey data collected by Vista can contribute to making the
investment into GMT even more the worth while.

[renormalised]

Gary, that's probably the best bit of funding the government have given to a science project for quite some time. It's a pity that weren't done more often.

What I'd like to see is a resurrection of the Spacewatch program, on a full time basis with dedicated telescopes.

[gary]

Hi Carl,

Indeed it is a good chunk of change and I know it was very much welcomed
by the professional astronomy community.

From my understanding, what is also commendable about the current
Australian Government funding was that it was done in the middle of an economic
downturn at the same time when, apparently, many of the countries in Europe
were being forced to cut back on funding for astronomy.

However, continual funding, that is year in, year out, with a sense of certainty
is also very important.

Behind the scenes at places like the AAO, the Research School of Astronomy
at ANU and CSIRO Astrophysics are teams of talented engineers, machinists, IT
staff, administrators and support personnel, technicians, operators, etc, etc.
who form the nine-tenths of the iceberg beneath the surface of organizations
such as these. For example, in Sydney and Canberra we are fortunate to have
some highly specialized instrumentation makers at these institutions. If funding
were to be ever skipped for a year, then these types of people are then forced
to move on and their very specialized talents, which are only acquired from
working on an evolution of instruments over many years, is lost. It then becomes
extremely difficult to reassemble a team that has had to be let go.

And instrumentation is a key part of large optical and radio telescopes. Without
state-of-the-art instrumentation, the probability of leading edge science coming
out of an observatory becomes much more difficult.

Some of the instrumentation developed in Australia is the "world's best"
and is used on some of the big scopes on Mauna Kea and in Chile.
For example, I was lucky to pay a visit to the AAO at Epping a few years
back and see the Echidna instrument being readied for the Subaru telescope
in Hawaii. What a fabulous piece of work it was. You can see some pictures here -
http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/echidna/gallery.html

One of the next big opportunities will be the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and
we have our fingers crossed that the international consortium will see the
advantages of making Australia its home, advantages that most Australians would
see as being self evident. :thumbsup:

[citivolus]

I find it interesting that the cameras on this scope will reach the sky fog limit at 10-60 seconds depending on the filter used. All that mounting for 60 second subs!

Oh, and check out the cable management.

[Jen]

cool :thumbsup: