Tag Archives: Telescope

A Giant Magellan Telescope Needs Giant Mirrors

Posted on by

The Giant Magellan Telescope doesn’t seem so giant in the renderings, until you see how the mirrors are made.

The telescope will require seven total mirrors each 27 feet (8.4 meters) in diameter for a total combined diameter of 24.5 meters. Half of an Olympic size pool’s length. A little over four times the diameter of the James Webb Space Telescope.

According to the website, the mirrors are cast at the University of Arizona mirror lab and take four years each to make. They’re made from blocks of Japanese glass laid out in a giant oven. The whole process of …read more

Continue reading A Giant Magellan Telescope Needs Giant Mirrors→

Hackaday Links: 👻 🎃 Spooky Edition, 2017

Posted on by

A few links posts ago, we wrote something about a company selling huge LED panels on eBay, ten panels for $50. Those panels are gone now, but a few lucky hackers got their hands on some cool hardware. Now there’s a project to reverse engineer these Barco NX-4 LED panels. Who’s going to be the first to figure out how to drive these things? Doesn’t matter — it’s a group project and we’re all made richer by the contributions of others.

Prague is getting a new hackerspace.

A year and a half ago, a $79 3D printer popped up on …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: 👻 🎃 Spooky Edition, 2017→

World’s Largest Telescope Stopped by LED

Posted on by

Earlier this year a simple indicator LED brought the Keck 1 telescope, a 370 tons mass, to a halting stop. How exactly did an LED do this? Simple: it did nothing.

As it so happens, [Andrew Cooper] was just about the leave the summit of Mauna Kea (in Hawaii) when his radio instructed him otherwise: there was an issue. Upon returning, [Andrew] was met by a room of scientists and summit supervisors. “Yeah, this was not good, why are they all looking at me? Oh, h%#*!” The rotor wasn’t moving the telescope, and “no rotator equals no science data.” After …read more

Continue reading World’s Largest Telescope Stopped by LED→

Embiggen your Eclipse 2017 Experience with a Sun Funnel

Posted on by

As exciting as Eclipse 2017 is going to be this Monday, for some folks it might appear a bit — underwhelming. Our star only occupies about half a degree of the sky, and looking at the partial phase with eclipse glasses might leave you yearning for a bigger image. If that’s you, you’ll need to build a sun funnel for super-sized eclipse fun.

[Grady] at Practical Engineering is not going to be lucky enough to be within the path of totality, but he is going to be watching the eclipse with a bunch of school kids. Rather than just outfitting …read more

Continue reading Embiggen your Eclipse 2017 Experience with a Sun Funnel→

Eclipse 2017: Was Einstein Right?

Posted on by

While most people who make the trek to the path of totality for the Great American Eclipse next week will fix their gazes skyward as the heavenly spectacle unfolds, we suspect many will attempt to post a duck-face selfie with the eclipsed sun in the background. But at least one man will be feverishly tending to an experiment.

On a lonely hilltop in Wyoming, Dr. Don Bruns will be attempting to replicate a famous experiment. If he succeeds, not only will he have pulled off something that’s only been done twice before, he’ll provide yet more evidence that Einstein was …read more

Continue reading Eclipse 2017: Was Einstein Right?→

Best Product Entry: Telescope Control With RDuinoScope

Posted on by

The Hackaday Prize is more than just giving tens of thousands of dollars to hardware hackers. It’s also about funding the next batch of Open Source hardware products. Alongside The Hackaday Prize — the contest where we’re funding hardware that will change the world, — we’re also giving away $30,000 to the project that will best become a product. It’s almost like we’re funding hardware startups here.

[Dessislav Gouzgounov] wanted to build a small piece of hardware — a GoTo for his telescope. This handheld controller would allow him to use software to align the telescope with whatever celestial …read more

Continue reading Best Product Entry: Telescope Control With RDuinoScope→

Budget Astrophotography With A Raspberry Pi

Posted on by

New to astrophotography, [Jason Bowling] had heard that the Raspberry Pi’s camera module could be used as a low-cost entry into the hobby. Having a Raspberry Pi B+ and camera module on hand from an old project, he dove right in, detailing the process for any other newcomers.

Gingerly removing the camera’s lens, the module fit snugly into a 3D printed case — courtesy of a friend — and connected it to a separate case for the Pi. [Bowling] then mounted he camera directly on the telescope — a technique known as prime-focus photography, which treats the telescope like an …read more

Continue reading Budget Astrophotography With A Raspberry Pi→

Keep an Eye on the Sky With rDuinoScope

Posted on by

We’ve all enjoyed looking up at a clear night sky and marveled at the majesty of the stars. Some of us have even pointed telescopes at particular celestial objects to get a closer view. Anyone who’s ever looked at anything beyond Jupiter knows the hassle involved.  It is most unfortunate that the planet we reside on happens to rotate about a fixed axis, which makes it somewhat difficult to keep a celestial object in the view of your scope.

It doesn’t take much to strap a few steppers and some silicon brains to a scope to counter the rotation of …read more

Continue reading Keep an Eye on the Sky With rDuinoScope→