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Article: COASTing to a sharper image. (Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope combines three optical telescopes to produce sharpest visible-light image of a stellar system available)(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- March 9, 1996
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Astronomers have now combined the light from three small optical telescopes to make the sharpest visible-light image to date of a stellar system. The picture shows several times as much detail as the Hubble Space Telescope can reveal and 50 times more than any single telescope on Earth could discern. The largest such telescope is the 10-meter W.M. Keck Telescope in Hawaii. To accomplish that feat, researchers borrowed a technique from radio astronomy, in which an array of dish-shaped detectors acts as one large radio telescope. By combining light from a trio of telescopes spaced 6 meters apart at the Lord's Bridge Observatory near Cambridge, England, the scientists formed ...