The Billion-Dollar Telescope Race - Issue 11: Light
▻http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/the-billion_dollar-telescope-race
When Warner Brothers animators wanted to include cutting-edge astronomy in a 1952 Bugs Bunny cartoon1 they set a scene at an observatory that looks like Palomar Observatory in California. The then-newly unveiled Hale Telescope, stationed at Palomar, had a 5-meter-diameter mirror, the world’s largest. In 1989, when cartoonist Bill Watterson included a mention of the world’s largest telescope in a “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon,2 he again set the action at Palomar. Although computers had grown a million times faster during those 38 years, and eight different particle colliders had been built and competed for their field’s top ranking, astronomy’s king of the hill stayed perched on its throne. This changed in 1992, with the introduction of the Keck telescope and its compound, 10-meter mirror. (...)
