NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known as SOFIA. (Photo: NASA)

The new SOFIA observatory isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet.

I got the chance to hitch a ride on one of its recent research flights as the plane left Moffett Field at the NASA Ames Research Center. It's definitely not the kind of flight where you get a bag of peanuts and movie.

The researchers take advantage of the nighttime sky, so we left at dusk for 10-hour tour flying zigzags across the Pacific Ocean. Each leg of the journey is carefully calculated so the telescope can pinpoint a far away star. The plane interior is packed with computers and equipment. It also lacks insulation since much of it was removed to install the telescope, so it's both cold and loud inside.

At four in the morning, the astronomers are still hard at work. If they're as tired as I am, they certainly aren't showing it.

"For me, this is very exciting," says Ian McLean, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He usually works on the ground. "All my career has been ground-based astronomy. So, it's only my second flight."

McLean says there's a good reason to do astronomy in the stratosphere. The atmosphere is thinner, which means it's easier for the telescope to see the stars. "It's almost as good as space," says McLean. "Not quite, but almost."

And unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope lands everyday, which means the scientists can update and fix the equipment. "By the time you get a mission into orbit, the technology you're using is relatively old. Here we can stay state of the art all the time," says McLean. NASA began developing SOFIA in 1997 and almost cancelled the project at one point. It flew its first science mission in November 2010 and now costs about $80 million a year to operate.

Searching for a "Holy Grail"

McLean says the SOFIA telescope could show astronomers something that's considered a Holy Grail in their field: seeing a star being born. It happens in huge, dusty clouds – stellar nurseries, as Mclean calls them. "The cloud is huge, light years across and it's gradually contracting to form a whole nursery of stars."

Inside NASA's SOFIA Observatory, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

But there's a problem. Astronomers can't see what's happening inside the clouds because, once again, they're made of dust and it's hard to see through.

"We don't mean dust bunnies, but we mean little, tiny little grains of solid material. Doesn't matter how big a telescope you have, you can't see inside it," McLean says.

That's why SOFIA looks at a special kind of light called infrared light. If you look through a telescope on the ground, you're looking at the visible light from space – the light our eyes can see. Infrared light is invisible to us, but it penetrates space dust, which means the telescope can see through the dust too.

"You get to see what you can't see with your eye. It's like a window has been opened," says McLean. They're looking for exactly how stellar nurseries give birth to young stars. McLean says catching a star as it's forming can reveal clues about how own solar system formed.

But star birth isn't the only thing these researchers want to see. They're also looking at the way stars die.

A Star on the Way Out

As the plane makes as sharp right turn, the telescope focuses on an object called NGC 7027. It's a planetary nebula – also known as a dying star. McLean and his team are capturing an infrared image of the nebula, which is about 3,000 light years away. They can also see what it's made of.

"It has a distinctive shape. It's oval. There's a hole in the middle and that's because it literally is a shell of gas that came off the star," says McLean.

7027 is dying because the star has run out of fuel – the same fate that our sun will face in about five billion years. As it dies, the star casts off its outer layers, shedding huge amounts of material to form a cloud around it. But it's not entirely a sad story.

"It won't be wasted," says McLean. "The material that was thrown off by that star in its dying phase, somewhere, millions, perhaps billions of years from now, will find its way into a new star and the planets that form around it."

From dead stars come new stars – and planets like our own. The oxygen and nitrogen in our bodies were once formed inside a star. "The cosmos is within us," as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We're made of star stuff."

As sky begins to lighten, we descend towards the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in the Mojave Desert, where the plane is based. The SOFIA telescope is now undergoing service upgrades and then will return to the skies three times a week. Astronomers from around the world are lining up to get on board.

Herbert Mehnert a Cline Scholar at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute spent his summer researching Comet Photometry and Morphology. Herbert was introduced to PARI by one of his college professors and jumped at the opportunity to work at the former NASA research institute.

"People don't look up anymore," explains Herbert Mehnert.

Herbert spent the summer of 2011 working at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute as a Cline Scholar student comet photometry and morphology.

"I think it's partially because the exposure to space and astronomy is much less than it used to be, with government programs being cut and all. When you take someone out here to a dark sky sight and tell them you can see the milky way, they get excited."

When Herbert was introduced to PARI by his college professor, Don Smith, who took them on a field trip to the remote research institute in Rosman, NC, Herbert was excited to know there was a community and research institute full of people interested in the same topics as him, particularly optical astronomy.

Herbert studies Comet Photometry and Morphology. Comet Photometry uses telescopes and cameras to measure the brightness of a comet, which provides scientists with information about its surface, craters, pits, valleys and mountains. The brightness of comets are more difficult to map than stars because the data involves using the nuclear condensation, surrounding cloud or coma and one or more tails extending outward from the comet. Comet Morphology studies the projected velocity and direction of a comet, based on its orbit, trail and size.

What's the difference between a comet and a meteorite? A comet is a structure composed of ice, dust, and elements such as ammonia, carbon dioxide and methane, that orbits around the sun. As it comes close to the sun, the nucleus begins to melt and turn into gas, forming a coma, or cloud. The radiation from the sun pushes this cloud away from the center of the comet, forming a dust tail. The most famous comet, comet Halley, travels around the sun every 76 years, and will reappear in the year 2062. Meteorites on the other hand are solid rock formations found in space. When meteorites enter the earth's atmosphere they heat up and turn into a fire, and appear as a shooting star.

Visit the PARI Sky center for more information and up-to-date celestial news. Also recommended are NASA's page on comets or the Comet Photometry website.

Photo by Tama Leaver via Flickr

If, like me, you have traditionally though of SETI as an organization that searches for little green men, you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that SETI's goals, projects and objectives have a significant impact on modern day science. "Celebrate Science" sounds like a great opportunities for families to learn more about SETI and what lies ahead.

"Celebrate Science" is a family event focused on activities for kids from 8 to 15. There will be a variety of hands on activities, such as learning more about the Institute's involvement with the Kepler mission, its ongoing search for life in space and even a solar telescope to take a close up look at what's happening on the sun!

The father of SETI and author of the Drake Equation, Dr. Frank Drake will be in attendance and Seth Shostak will be speaking about SETI and his book, "Confessions of an Alien Hunter". Moreover, this event is free to attend. More information can be learned on SETI's website.

Recently, SETI has fallen on hard times, with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) being forced into hibernation due to lack of funds. The ATA comprises 42 telescopes in Northern California that scan for radio signals from outer space, searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. In response to this funding deficit, SETI recently launched SETIstars, a kickstarter to raise $200,000 to bring the ATA back online. With 17 days left, its reached nearly half its goal but could still use help. If you'd like to donate or learn more, visit SETIstars, and help SETI bring back the ATA.

Watch KQED QUEST's story for more info: SETI: The New Search for ET

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Homemade Dobsonian at 2010 Golden State Star Party

With the weather getting warmer, the stargazing season is once again here. If you've considered buying a telescope but don't have the budget to splurge on one, another great option is to make your own telescope.

The Randall Museum is beginning its Dobsonian telescope making series tonight. John Dobson, after which the Dobsonian is named, popularized the use of the Dobsonian telescope and was an integral part of making larger scale telescopes accessible and affordable to the general public. He founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers in the 1960's and the group has flourished in making astronomy more accessible to the public — even from one's sidewalk.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

The Dobsonian telescope is a relatively simple, low cost alt-azimuth mounted Newtonian telescope. In this class you'll learn the step-by-step method for grinding and polishing the telescope mirror, building the mount, and assembling a complete telescope.  Once done, you'll be able to see a variety of celestial bodies including the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter or the Orion Nebulae. The class runs ten weeks and costs between $300 -$400 dollars for materials. Purchasing a telescope of the same size would probably run you 2x the cost of making it on your own.

To learn more visit Randall Museum's website and watch the QUEST story, "Amateur Astronomers."

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Counting craters on a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image
of the Moon's surface. NASA/LRO

Ever been out on a clear, lazy night and tried to count the stars–or the kind that fall from the sky during a meteor shower? How about craters on the Moon, or distant galaxies in deep space?

If you like this kind of work, there is a job for you! Several, in fact….

In this day of the Internet and electronic databases, our ability to store, process, share, and, yes, be overwhelmed by information is greater than ever before. In fact, our ability to analyze data is only outmatched by our capacity to acquire it—which offers some pleasing challenges: buried in the riches of data of our Universe that we are piling up around us, there is plenty of opportunity for just about anyone to grab a shovel and dig in, sharing in the adventure of exploration of the Universe around us!

Okay, that was the sales pitch, here are some details.

Count some stars! Subject: stars visible to the naked eye; what's being investigated: the impact of urban light pollution on our access to the simple wonders of the night sky. Every year, Windows to the Universe conducts the Great Worldwide Star Count citizen science project, enabling anyone who can look up at the night sky and count some of the stars there to participate in real science. We're already into the Count, which runs this year from October 31st through November 12th. For details on how to participate, check out their website.

Results from the Great Worldwide Star Count are presented in a global map showing the "limiting magnitude" from thousands of locations where citizen scientists observed. The limiting magnitude is a measure of brightness of the faintest star that can be seen from a given location.

How about craters on the Moon? Looking at the Moon through a small telescope, you can count some of the largest craters—those that are typically at least a mile or so across. By virtue of the powerful LROC camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the surface of the Moon is rabidly being photographed to a level of detail that reveals craters as small as a foot and a half across!

Craters are a fantastically rich source of information regarding the history of our solar system, each one a record of a single meteoroid impact which, when examined in context with all the rest, allows scientists to forensically piece together the puzzle of the formation of the Moon and our region of the solar system.

While there are estimated to be at least 300,000 lunar craters with diameters of about half a mile or greater on the side of the Moon facing the Earth, smaller craters are estimated into the millions, and microcraters are most likely uncountably common.

This means science needs your help! And you can give it, at Moon Zoo. Log onto the Moon Zoo website, register yourself as an official lunar explorer, and have at it, friend. Examining LRO images of the Moon's surface, you will count and classify craters and boulders, and mark unusual and interesting lunar features, as you explore. There are so many images that have been acquired by LRO that in many cases you will be the first person ever to lay eyes on the particular patches of the Moon you examine—you might even run across something remarkable, like a derelict lunar robot from the 1960s (it's happened!). Best of all, your work will count, your data feeding into a growing database from Moon Zoo explorers all over the world.

A sibling site to Moon Zoo—Galaxy Zoo—lets you examine and classify galaxies imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. And since there are millions upon millions of unclassified galaxies that have been caught in Hubble's telescopic net, you'll be covering unexplored territories of space and contributing to our planet's understanding of the Universe….

There's a lot of work to do out there, and the glittering treasure trove of data just keeps getting larger and larger—so get to work!

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Artist's rendering of exoplanets around a star. (Credit: NASA)

The Earth may not be as unique as we think it is. That's according to findings announced today by UC Berkeley. Astronomers there believe that Earth-sized planets may be more abundant in the universe than previously thought.

For five years, a team of scientists lead by UC Berkeley watched 166 stars, similar in size to our Sun and all within 80 light years of Earth. In all, they discovered extra-solar planets or "exoplanets" orbiting 22 of the stars. Some are as large as Jupiter while others are about three times the size of Earth, the smallest planet they can detect. Smaller planets were found more frequently than the larger planets.

"We found smaller planets in spades," said astronomer Andrew Howard of UC Berkeley. Using the data, Howard and his team created a statistical model to predict what other planets might be present. "We extrapolated that trend down to Earth-sized planets."

Howard says the data shows that nearly one in four stars like our Sun could have Earth-sized planets. "This is really the first quantitative estimate of the fraction of sun-like stars that have Earth-like planets. Before, the guesses were all over the map. Some people thought it was 100%. Some people thought it was one in a million."

The 33 planets found in the study orbit very close to their stars, meaning temperatures there are most likely too high to support life. The discoveries were made with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii using 10-meter ground telescopes. The planets were found using the "wobble" of the stars – the subtle movement that occurs when a star is pulled by the gravity of its orbiting planets.

The announcement joins a number of exoplanet discoveries in recent months, including NASA's finding of two exoplanets in August. Today's findings were published in the journal Science.

Howard says while the ultimate goal is to find Earth-like planets that could have liquid water, this finding is an important first step. "People have wondered for millennia: is the Earth common or is it rare? And we're starting to learn that the Earth is not a one-off in the universe. It may have cousins out there."

For more on how scientists find exoplanets, check out this QUEST story.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Close-ups of asteroids captured by robotic spacecraft.

When you hear the word "asteroid," what image is evoked in your mind? A confusion of tumbling, skittering mountains in space suitable for a breath-defying spaceship chase? Blue-white digital outlines of big rocks flying around a video screen, ready to be blasted into pixel dust by your torpedo cannon? Or perhaps, as some science fiction stories would have it, a tiny barren world complete with a breathable atmosphere and giant space worms living in deep crater caverns….

Ah, gotta love science fiction.

As Sci-Fi is often more colorful than reality, are the facts about asteroids a bit more down to Earth (so to speak)? Big gray rocks, perhaps quite large, but otherwise less interesting even than the granite mountains of an Earthly place like Yosemite? Well…try scooping up a handful of sand; at first glance you may see only a pile of tawny-gray grains. Look more closely—with a magnifying glass or microscope—and a veritable treasure trove of colorful jewels is revealed.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is just such an instrument, and has revealed that asteroids may have more variety than once imagined.

Spitzer recently ran out of the supply of coolant that kept its infrared cameras cold—at least, cold enough to sense the subtle heat radiation emitted by distant celestial objects. Now that Spitzer's instruments have "warmed up" to a balmy negative 406 degrees F, observers have shifted their attention to other objectives, including asteroids.

In particular, Spitzer has observed the infrared emanations from a hundred or so Near Earth Asteroids: those that cross Earth's orbit in the course of their own elliptical routines. There are plans to observe 600 or more NEAs in the future—out of about 7000 currently known Near Earth Objects (which includes comets and meteoroids).

The observing program aims to give us a clearer focus on the individual characteristics of these flying mountains that Earth shares space with: the sizes, the composition, and even the age and origins of what is proving to be a diverse and rich population. Spitzer's infrared cameras see past the façade of mere visible light, which, at the distance of most NEOs, doesn't tell us much more than the amount of light they reflect. A big, dark asteroid and a small, light-colored one may reflect the same amount of light, giving those distant specks in the telescopic image the same appearance.

But throwing in an infrared measurement of an asteroid's heat emissions can reveal much more: the temperature of an asteroid is governed by the amount of sunlight it absorbs, which is in turn governed by size, color, composition, and its distance from the Sun.

Already Spitzer's initial 100 asteroid observations have revealed a wide variety of characteristics—maybe not unlike that handful of sand grains scrutinized under a microscope.

Meteorites, having fallen to Earth and been examined up close, have long revealed that their "source mountains" (their parent asteroids, from which they were broken away by collisions) are diverse in composition. We find stone meteorites, and meteorites of solid nickel-iron, sometimes embedded with crystalline gemstones of great beauty.

Combining the compositional data on NEOs gleaned from Spitzer with their orbital characteristics determined through ground-based observatories–such as Chabot's own Asteroid Search program—we are learning a great deal about the NEO neighborhood, and what exactly may be passing quietly in the night. It's all good information, giving us a better handle on how to protect our planet from possible impacts, and laying the groundwork for future missions of exploration to Earth-passing asteroids.

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There are a variety of places to go stargazing in and around the Bay Area which provide magnificent views of the cosmos.

A couple weeks ago I spent the weekend geeking out with astronomy buffs and sci-fi fans at the first ever SETIcon. Organized by SETI Institute, the event was filled with a variety of fun and informative panels that re-kindled my love of astronomy. After the event, I had an insatiable desire to do some stargazing — but where to go in the Bay Area?

One of the biggest misconceptions about astronomy is that you need to buy hundreds of dollars worth of equipment to enjoy the hobby. Fortunately this is a myth, and I am going to dispel it right here and right now! Whether you already have a telescope, are interested in building a telescope or are simply discovering a new hobby that can spark the imagination of family members from 5 to 95 years old, there are a variety of opportunities to enjoy the evening sky that are not far from your doorstep.

Here are just a few (free!) options if you don’t have a telescope:

Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley organizes a bi-monthly stargazing event every 1st and 3rd Saturday night of the month, year-round. The next event will be on September 4th at 9 – 11pm. Starting September 18th stargazing will run from 8 – 10pm. For full details and cloudy weather cancellation notices, follow them on Twitter: @lhsstargazing

Jazz Under the Stars at San Mateo Community College is fun, family friendly event that combines jazz music and stargazing. The next event will be on September 18th from 8 -11pm.

Most counties have their own astronomy club: East Bay Astronomical Society, San Francisco Astronomical Society, San Jose Astronomical Association and San Mateo County Astronomical Society offer events every month to look up at the stars. Members are very friendly and eager to engage the community in stargazing. Check their websites for the latest details.

If you’re more serious about Astronomy and would like to spend a few nights stargazing in dark skies, the next major star party is CalStar, from October 7 – 9th midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles near Lake San Antonio. This event is an excellent way to learn from dozens of amateur astronomers, look through telescopes larger than YOU and see a variety of celestial objects. This is my favorite kind of star party!

Now if you really want to go all hard core on astronomy and gain serious nerd cred, there's a class to teach you how to make your own telescope. Believe it or not, this isn’t as hard as it seems, but it is time consuming. After a few months you’ll come out with a finished telescope that costs a fraction of what it would cost to buy. The Telescope Makers Workshop at Chabot Space and Science Center meets Friday nights from 7-10pm.

So what are you waiting for? Look up!

For more science and DIY goodness 7 days a week follow Laura on twitter.

Related QUEST stories:
Amateur Astronomers
SETI: The New Search For ET

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The Thirty Meter Telescope would be built in Hawaii, atop Mauna Kea at around 13,000 feet. Artist's interpretation courtesy of TMT Observatory Corporation.

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

Scientists from the University of California are working with a team of international researchers on one of the most high-profile science projects of this decade: an effort to construct the largest optical telescope on Earth.

The $986 million project is planned for the summit of Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, and will feature a primary mirror 98-feet in diameter.

Scientists working on the project hope to begin construction next year and complete it by 2018 or 2019. They say the facility, dubbed the Thirty Meter Telescope, will allow astronomers to observe with much more clarity some of the earliest stars and galaxies of the universe and investigate what they’re made of.

“We’ll be able to look back at the baby pictures of the universe and trace how it developed,” said Michael Bolte, director of the University of California Observatories and a member of the board of directors for the new telescope.

The telescope won approval last month from the University of Hawaii Board of Regents, which holds the lease to the site.

In addition to exploring the farthest reaches of the universe, the telescope also will be able to routinely and easily produce images of the more than 450 planets that have been discovered orbiting stars outside of our solar system.

Today, the existence of these so-called “exoplanets” can only be inferred by measuring the gravitational tugging forces exerted by the stars they orbit. The telescope also could help determine if some of them have atmospheres similar to Earth’s – the precursor to finding life on another planet.

“It will be one of the most important scientific facilities of the 21st century,” said Bolte, who is also a professor of astronomy at UC-Santa Cruz. “When we look back, it’s going to be the Large Hadron Collider and the Thirty Meter Telescope and I’m not sure what else.”

The project is a joint effort of the University of California, the California Institute of Technology and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy.

A sizable amount of its funding is coming from the Bay Area. The Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation, in Palo Alto, has pledged $200 million toward the telescope’s construction. The University of California and Caltech each plan to raise $50 million. And contributions are expected from the Canadian universities, as well as the governments of China, India and Japan. But 10 to 20 percent of the telescope’s budget still remains to be raised, said Bolte.

The new telescope’s 98-foot (30 meter) mirror would be three times as big as the mirrors on the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently the biggest in the world, and also owned by the University of California and Caltech. The telescope would produce images three times as sharp as the 33-foot Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, and would be able to look at objects that are nine times fainter. This would make it possible for scientists to better understand the origins of the universe.

“The universe is 13.7 billion years old and we can see objects that are 13 billion years away, but all we get is fuzzy blobs,” said UC-Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth, chair of the telescope’s Science Advisory Committee. “We’d like to learn more about these stars and galaxies.”

In January of 2010, Illingworth and his team announced that they had observed the most distant galaxies ever seen. Looking back in time 13 billion years, they found galaxies that were just 600 or 700 million years from the Big Bang. Photographs of these galaxies, which appear as several tiny dots, were made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Space-based telescopes like Hubble have an advantage over ground telescopes because they don’t have to contend with the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. But they’re more expensive and therefore, smaller. Hubble’s mirror is less than 8 feet in diameter.

Bigger ground-based telescopes can gather more light than small space-based telescopes. So they make objects that once were faint appear brighter. And the additional light gives researchers information on the chemical composition of objects like stars.

When astronomers understand what a star is made out of, they can better establish its age. And this allows them to plot out the history of the universe more accurately. What’s understood now is that the Big Bang was followed by a period of darkness that astronomers call the Dark Ages. But it’s not clear how long that period lasted.

“There’s controversy about the period before which there were no stars,” said Jerry Nelson, UC-Santa Cruz astronomer and project scientist for the telescope. “The idea is to establish bounds on this. The question is when do you get stars forming that burn holes through this opaque stuff?”

In addition to answering questions about the history of the universe, observers say the telescope could also eventually lead to new energy sources based on the nuclear fusion that fuels stars.

“All those points of light are nuclear furnaces,” said bestselling San Francisco author Timothy Ferris, who wrote “Seeing in the Dark” and other books about astronomy and telescopes. “And they have something to teach us.”

The telescope’s mirror will be made out of 492 closely fit individual hexagonal glass mirrors. The Keck telescopes were the first to use these segmented mirrors to get around the problems created by gigantic individual mirrors. The Keck telescopes were so successful, said Illingworth, that UC and Caltech envisioned the Thirty Meter Telescope as a way to scale-up the Keck model.

TMT Fly-Through from Thirty Meter Telescope on Vimeo.

But big ground-based telescopes have their limitations. Though they can give astronomers more light to study, they can’t by virtue of their size alone make objects appear sharper. To reduce the blurring caused by the atmosphere, scientists use a series of techniques called adaptive optics.

“Adaptive optics is like putting glasses on a big telescope,” said Nelson. A telescope with adaptive optics not only sees sharper images of stars, it also sees more stars.

An expensive and technically complicated process, adaptive optics was used on telescopes for the first time to correct distortions on the Keck telescopes. The technique takes advantage of a layer of the atmosphere that starts about 50 miles above the Earth. This layer is made up of sodium atoms brought in by small meteorites that vaporize as they enter the atmosphere.

Scientists point an orange laser toward the sodium layer. The laser excites the sodium atoms, which become like artificial stars, radiating light back toward the telescope. The process allows researchers to correct for atmospheric turbulence, which causes phenomena such as the twinkle that we see around stars.

Other telescopes in the range of the Thirty Meter Telescope are in the works. An 80-foot mirror called the Giant Magellan Telescope is being spearheaded by a group that includes the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Harvard University, the universities of Texas and Arizona and the government of Korea. That telescope is scheduled to be completed in 2018. And Europe is working on the aptly named Extremely Large Telescope, which would have a 138-foot mirror.

“They’re strongly complimentary,” said Bolte. “The Giant Magellan and the European telescope will be in the southern hemisphere, in Chile. So we’ll have access to the entire sky.” Having several of these instruments, he said, would make valuable telescope time more readily available to astronomers.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be built at an elevation of about 13,000 feet, has not been without controversy. Environmentalists say its construction would harm the wekiu bug, a native species that lives atop high Hawaiian peaks. Some Native Hawaiians have come out in opposition, saying that the summit of Mauna Kea is sacred and should not have any more construction.

Scientists hope that the Thirty Meter Telescope will provide answers for many current astronomy questions: What is the invisible matter that makes up 25 percent of universe? What is the mysterious energy that is making it expand faster and faster? But Bolte suspects that just as telescopes in the past surprised scientists by revealing that the planets orbit the Sun and that the universe is expanding, the new telescope’s contributions are impossible to fully predict.

“Every time you build a new telescope with significant new capabilities, you usually solve the problems of the day and find new things you didn’t even know were there,” Bolte said. “The Thirty Meter Telescope will be a bigger jump than any other jump we’ve had, so the new discoveries will be all the more unexpected.”

***

TMT Overview from Thirty Meter Telescope on Vimeo.

Check out these QUEST TV and Radio stories about other University of California astronomy projects:

Illuminating the Northern Lights

Exoplanets

SETI: The New Search for ET

The Planet Hunters

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Depiction of Galileo demonstrating his astronomical telescope.

(Almost as famous as this act of opening our eyes to wonders we'd never witnessed, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition for pointing out that there were more things in heaven than were imagined by Church doctrine–but that's another story altogether…)

It's an intriguing fact that, beyond the Sun merely being a bright disk, the Moon a not-so-bright and slightly mottled disk, the stars pinpoints of light and the planets pinpoints of light that move, everything we have learned about the universe and the objects in it we have learned in the last four centuries, since the invention of the telescope and Galileo's putting it to it's most famous use: astronomy.

Galileo saw on the Moon craters, mountains, and valleys, and likened the "uneven, rough… depressions and bulges" to Earth's geographical features. Venus was revealed to undergo lunar-like phases, which provided controversial insight into the layout of the Solar System. Jupiter had four small "star-like" moons that moved around it–which defied Church doctrine holding that everything in the universe goes around the Earth. And Saturn possessed jug-handle-like protrusions, whatever those were!

It may be difficult to imagine what Galileo was feeling when he made these discoveries of things we take for granted. How exciting to peer through that celestial peephole and discover that the Moon is another world, and that there are worlds out there that had never been seen or imagined before. Sure, new discoveries about Mars keep rolling in, and we're finding a new extrasolar planet about every month–but the excitement about these discoveries is tempered by the fact that we already suspected things like these as possibilities. For Galileo, the magnified astronomical sky was practically a blank canvass.

Back to IYA 2009–what's going on? Who's promoting this, and what is being done to celebrate?

NASA is promoting it, and many different organizations (including Chabot and the Eastbay Astronomical Society) are participating in a number of ways: star parties, special programs, special events, and good old fashioned put-your-eye-to-this-telescope-and-gawk public observing activities.
Honestly, there's nothing like looking through a telescope–and it doesn't have to be a large one. I don't doubt that I first became inspired into astronomy when, as a child, my family would take me to Chabot Observatory to look through the telescopes.

When the new Chabot Space & Science Center reopened the telescopes after the move to our present site, I found all of the childhood wonder flooded back when I put my eye to the eyepiece to regard Saturn. There's an excitement that simply can't be achieved by looking at photographs. You just have to experience it for yourself, as Galileo did four centuries ago…

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