🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <199210281533.AA02994@tuna.wang.com> IMAGING.CLUB@OFFICE.WANG.COM ("Imaging Club") writes:
>... The main point of the article is that these new ground
>telescopes are going to make the Hubble space telescope technology
>obsolete...

This is the usual ill-informed claim, I'm afraid.  Hubble has three or four
different edges over ground-based astronomy, and the new big ground-based
telescopes are only addressing one of them.  The most obvious case in point
is that ground-based ultraviolet astronomy is largely impossible, and no
amount of smart optics is going to fix that.

From the Economist I had expected better.

A more accurate statement is that Hubble's edge over ground-based telescopes
is not as large as it was intended to be.  That's largely a result of the
interminable delays in the project (of which the shuttle grounding was only
the most recent).  Its gestation period was nearly 25 years, and the basic
design was frozen 15+ years ago.
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry