Magellan II's Adaptive Optics Top Hubble's Resolution 136
muon-catalyzed writes "The incredible 'first light' images captured by the new adaptive optics system called Magellan|AO for "Magellan Adaptive Optics" in the Magellan II 6.5-meter telescope are at least twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum as those from the NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 'We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across — the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away,' said Laird Close (University of Arizona), the project's principal scientist. The 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in the high desert of Chile were widely considered to be the best natural imaging telescopes in the world and this new technology upgraded them to the whole new level. With its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror. Until now, Hubble always produced the best visible light images, since even large ground-based telescope with complex adaptive optics imaging cameras could only make blurry images in visible light. The core of the new optics system, the so-called Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) that can change its shape at 585 points on its surface 1,000 times each second, counteracts the blurring effects of the atmosphere."
Re:Still can't handle proper units? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can say that because nobody does those conversions with any frequency in every day living. If you're even claiming that, it means that you aren't paying attention.
I lived under the metric system for an entire year and not one time did it make anything easier for me. Not even a single conversion during that entire period was made more convenient by using SI units. And many things were less convenient because of the base 10 system they use. The most common conversions like distance into time are equally taxing regardless of whether you're using KMPH and KM or MPH and Miles. In either case you just divide the distance by the speed and you wind up with the same unit.
Weather was annoying because most of the year fluctuated within a 10 degree Celsius window giving less meaningful numbers than I would have had with Fahrenheit. And what's more, because the scale was designed with science in mind, the numbers themselves are far less logical for humans than with Fahrenheit.
In other words, despite all the propaganda out there, the metric system is of no additional value for every day living over Imperial measures and it makes certain things less convenient as the real magic of the metric system is the specially chosen units that make science easier, but have absolutely no connection with everyday living. I found most meat and produce to be sold by the half kilo, because that's a more convenient size to buy things in and coincidentally that's just a little bit more than a pound.