The world's most powerful optical telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) has turned its eyes skyward for the first time with astronomers releasing pictures taken by the telescope of the spiral galaxy NGC 2770.
View of LBT. Taken in November 2006. Credit: Public Domain/Wikipedia
Essentially two large telescopes joined together, the LBT is located on 10,700-foot Mount Graham in the Pinaleno Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The $120 million pair of 8m binoculars uses the two mirrors working together to maximise the amount of light it receives, increasing the view of deep space available to astronomers.
Providing new and more powerful pictures of deep space, the project has taken more than two decades to come into fruition, a great effort across three countries said observatory scientists.
"The amount of time and work that was put into this project to reach the point where we are today is immense," said LBT Director Richard Green. "To see the telescope operational with both mirrors is a great feeling."
“This has been years in the making and to now have a fully functioning binocular telescope is not only a time for celebration here at LBT, but also for the entire astronomy community," added Professor Peter Strittmatter of the University of Arizona.
"The images that this telescope will produce will be like none seen before; the power and clarity of this machine is in a class of its own. We will now have the ability to peer into history, seeing the birth stars, galaxies and possibly even the origins the universe,” he said.
The LBT uses two 8.4 m (27ft) mirrors will give LBT the equivalent light-gathering capacity of a single 11.8m (39ft) instrument and the resolution of a 22.8m (75ft) telescope with a resolution ten times that of the Hubble space telescope. The project is jointly owned by astronomical research centres in Italy, Germany and the United States.
It was first founded in October 2004 and saw its first light in 2005 with the installation of its first mirror. The second mirror was commissioned in January of this year.
See here for NGC 2770 images released by the LBT.
Further images.
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