Americans Will Have Their Chance,

on early Wednesday morning,

to watch a full lunar eclipse, for us in Thailand and the Far East it will be around 6.00 this Wednesday evening to view this phenomenon, the only slight problem is that as I write this it is totally overcast and actually raining, but telescope to the ready,

speaking of which I am sure we have all heard of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has brought us astonishing pictures of space before like this one titled  'Mystic Mountain',

well as some one once said, 'you ain't seen nothing yet', as work on the first of 7 giant mirrors has been finished for the largest astronomical mirror ever made, the mirror will be part of the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope, some of the facts of which are mind blowing, scientists at the University of Arizona and in California have completed the most challenging large astronomical mirror ever made, for the past several years, a group of optical scientists and engineers working at the UA Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory underneath the UA’s football stadium have been polishing an 8.4-meter (27 ½ feet) diameter mirror with an unusual, highly asymmetric shape,

by the standards used by optical scientists, the “degree of difficulty” for this mirror is 10 times that of any previous large telescope mirror, the mirror surface matches the desired prescription to a precision of 19 nanometers – so smooth that if it were the size of the continental U.S., the highest mountains would be little more than a half-inch high! 

this mirror, and six more like it, will form the heart of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), providing more than 380 square meters, or 4,000 square feet, of light-collecting area, the Giant Magellan Telescope will lead a next generation of giant telescopes that will explore planets around other stars and the formation of stars, galaxies and black holes in the early universe,

the mirror was cast at the mirror lab from 20 tons of glass, melted in a rotating furnace until it flowed into a honeycomb mold, once the glass had cooled and the mold material was removed, scientists at the lab used a series of fine abrasives to polish the mirror, checking its figure regularly using a number of precision optical tests, the mirror has an unconventional shape because it is part of what ultimately will be a single 25-meter (82 feet) optical surface composed of seven circular segments, each 8.4 meters (27 ½ feet) in diameter, 

the Giant Magellan Telescope will be located on a remote mountaintop in the Chilean Andes where the skies are clear and dark, far from any sources of light pollution, at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in northern Chile, earthmovers are completing the removal of 4 million cubic feet of rock to produce a flat platform for the telescope and its supporting buildings, it is thought that the new telescope will bring us images 8 times more detailed than is possible with the Hubble telescope, it is almost impossible to imagine what wonders this giant telescope will bring us when it is completed in hopefully 2020.