recent photo-crawford,tx

over my head here? Those pics are from NEW MEXICO not Texas. Is there a point to be made with your subject line that I missed?

TONI

telescopes on one side of the world into a super mega array, and get some really high resolution photos out of it. There have been experiments including syncing dishes on either side of the US and this has improved resolution significantly.

It's amazing what computer power has been able to do in the world of Astronomy. There is a nice old Observatory that was used by the University of Toronto from the 20's to the early 50's but as Toronto expanded the light pollution got intolerable and the Observatory became unusable for science. Then along came computer power, now they do a baseline for light pollution and various elemental emissions (sodium vapour lamps for example give a huge sodium line on spectroscopy) but now they're able to subtract all that stuff electronically, and the Observatory is back in business full time. Before this the students had to travel 350 miles north to Algonquin Park and use much smaller telescopes, now the 6 footer in Richmond Hill, just 15 miles north of the University is back in the running.

My son was very interested in astronomy around the age of 7 so we ended up going to the Observatory fairly frequently. One of the proudest memories I have is of him asking a question which absolutely stopped the lecturer (a PhD) dead in his tracks. After answering the question, the lecturer sidled up to me and said "How old is he?" I told him and he said "Have him look me up in 11 years", and walked away shaking his head. Sadly Robbies interests have drifted away from science because he's not a big fan of math, but he writes like an angel so he'll do alright.

Rob