Saturday, July 18, 2009

Is it dark enough?

Astronomers tend to situate their telescopes in places where are no artificial light sources - they want to observe dark sky. One of such places is Las Campanas Observatory in Chile where twin 6.5 m Magellanic telescopes, 2.5 m Du Pont telescope, 1 m Swope telescope and of course 1.3 m Warsaw telescope operate. There are some smaller telescopes like ASAS or Pi of the Sky. It isn't true that we don't like physicists from our faculty, we just don't like the way they treat dark sky. Their telescope during observations looks like that:


Are you able to find any unnecessary light on that picture?
(Clue: there is one in camera casing)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've asked Ariel about this IR light some months ago and he only said that it doesn't distrub Pi at all. BTW: There are more and more lights around LCO... I've noticed it after 3 seasons :(