🚀 go-pugleaf

The current issue of the Economist has a very interesting, lengthy
article on the new generation of large telescopes that is coming
along.  The main point of the article is that these new ground
telescopes are going to make the Hubble space telescope technology
obsolete, althought Hubble will continue to provide valuable
service especially after the shuttle mission with the "fix."  The
plan is to use image processing to make ground corrections for all
the image aberrations caused by the changing atmosphere.  The
technique is to create artificial stars high in the atmosphere by
bouncing a laser beam off various layers.  Since the expected apparent
position of the artificial star is known, ground observers can make real
time corrections (many times per sec.) when the artificial star's image
shows up at the telescope slightly off, correcting the images of everything
else in the field.These corrections are made by mechanical movements of
the mirror or component portions of the mirror.  This is a fascinating
article with some amazing technology being described.  If anyone would
like me to air mail them a copy, let me know.  It's too long to retype
and I don't have OCR (or intelligent character recognition) at this
location.  This article has nothing to do with Wang imaging products.

Michael.Willett@OFFICE.Wang.com