A globetrotting S&T photographer visits five

of the world’s great portals to the universe.

VISIONS OF TOD
I By P • K Chen
t’s been my passion since 1993 to photograph the
world’s largest telescopes. Atop faraway moun-
tains, majestically above the clouds, these
optical wonders stand at the forefront of as-
tronomy. The names Keck, Gemini, VLT,
Magellan, and Subaru are already well
known in the scientific community, but
seeing them firsthand is different.
From up close, their hardware and
homes seem to echo their names, as
if their mere existence commands
respect. The following pages pro-
vide very recent glimpses of these
engineering triumphs.
Much has changed since the
Hale 5.1-meter (200-inch) tele-
scope on Palomar Mountain wore
the crown as the world’s premier in-
strument. These and other great ob-
servatories have all-new designs, each
with larger, better optics. Some of the cur-
rent giants have segmented mirrors, domes
that turn with them, or perhaps a spinning dish
of liquid mercury. They use technologies such as ac-
tive mirror supports, adaptive optics, even interferometry.
Following my photo essay are a comprehensive survey and
pullout poster of progress in the 20th century, where Roger W. Sin-
nott, David Tytell, and I detail more than six dozen of the largest cur-
rent reflectors, refractors, and Schmidt telescopes on Earth. Following
that, Sky & Telescope’s newest contributing editor, Govert Schilling, re-
ports on what the next generation of giant scopes may be like.
Perhaps no less awe-inspiring than the instruments them-
selves are the discoveries they will make in years to come.

34 August 2000 Sky & Telescope ©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
 The four reflectors of the Very Large Telescope bear names of celestial objects
in the Mapuche language still used by some native Chileans. From left they
are Antu, the Sun; Kueyen, the Moon; Melipal, the Southern Cross; and Yepun,
Sirius — otherwise known as Unit Telescope 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In this
five-hour exposure last September, their domes are aglow from moonlight in
the northwest (left) as Jupiter, Saturn, and the stars of Orion wheel overhead.

All photographs are by P • K Chen

©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
 M aking my way up Chile’s
Cerro Paranal, 2,635 meters
above sea level, I thought I was approaching
a UFO base on Mars! A clutch of odd-looking cylinders
dominates the high ground, and partway down the slope
sits a little town of dormitories, workshops, and other facili-
ties needed to operate the European Southern Observato-
ry’s Very Large Telescope. Two of the four 8.2-m reflectors —
those called Antu and Kueyen — are already making obser-
vations every clear night,
Tandem Telescopes and Melipal is undergoing
of the VLT final checks. The fourth,
Yepun, could be opera-
tional later this year. Up close the VLT domes seem larger
than life, Yepun being leftmost in the large picture (facing
page). In the view at far right middle is the
track for one of the 1.8-m reflectors that
will become part of the VLT’s interferome-
try array — a hint at the kind of work that
lies in the not-too-distant future. Within
the underground tunnel at top center,
light from all four telescopes will be com-
bined into a single beam.
On this page are two views of Antu,
the first of the VLT components to see
starlight. Directly under the primary mir-
ror hangs the large tubular Focal Reduc-
er and Spectrograph (FORS) instrument
package, which swings around as the
telescope turns.
I had the rare opportunity to enter
the control room for Kueyen (top center)
and sit in the very cockpit of this No. 2
spaceship! Colorful monitors keep an
operator apprised of environmental fac-
tors and the telescope’s aim.

36 August 2000 Sky & Telescope ©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Sky & Telescope August 2000 37
 T wo nearly identical 8.1-m
telescopes, one on Mauna
Kea, Hawaii, and the other at Cerro
Pachón, Chile, have the strangest-looking domes I’ve
ever seen. When closed up they look like giant hamburg-
ers. Then the ringlike wall sections slide up and down the
periphery and the build-
Separated at Birth, ings become great, open-
The Gemini Twins air gazebos! Interesting
features like these, along
with infrared capability and adaptive optics, set apart the
Gemini Project of AURA (the Association of Universities for
Research in Astronomy).
Gemini North (this page) was dedicated in June 1999,
just days after spectacular images of Pluto and Charon,
split like a wide double star, proved that its adaptive op-
tics really work. Gemini North’s high-tech dome at right
contrasts with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope’s old-
fashioned dome in the background.

38 August 2000 Sky & Telescope ©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
 G emini South (this page) was in the early stages of as-
sembly when I visited last September. There I saw the
insides of its massive altazimuth bearing (left close-up) and
one of the altitude trunnions (right close-up) — a far cry
from those of the usual Dobsonian. This telescope’s
primary mirror arrived on the mountain in
February, and it may see first light this
month.

©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

 A top the Manqui ridge at Las Campanas, Chile, a 10-knot wind blows from the north
all night long. Bright stars like Antares and Fomalhaut pass directly overhead. This is
the home of the Carnegie Institution’s Magellan Project, where the first of two 6.5-m tele-
scopes has already received its spin-cast mirror and is beginning to look a lot like a scaled-
up WIYN 3.5-m reflector. When I visited last fall, the first dome
The Dual Eyes was fully up and run-
of Magellan ning, and a huge crane
was hoisting pieces of
the second dome into place. Each dome is
equipped with what look like giant Venetian
blinds to keep warm air from collecting around
the optics. No one is quite sure why, but
Las Campanas has some of the
best astronomical seeing
on the planet. Maybe
it’s because the terrain slopes down so sharply on all sides.
No giant gears on these scopes. They have pure friction
drives on their smooth altitude bearings. Climbing up to
one of the Nasmyth instrument platforms (small picture
above), I could see clear through to the other side be-
cause the flat mirror was not yet in place.

©2000 Sky©2000
Publishing
Sky Publishing
Corp. All rights
Corp.reserved.
All rights reserved.


A t a height of 4,150 meters

above the Pacific Ocean,
Hawaii’s tallest peak, Mauna
Kea, is home to the greatest sin-
gle collection of large telescopes
in the world. Leading the pack are
the twin 9.8-m Kecks (above) and
the 8.2-m Subaru nearby. The air is so
thin that getting from one to the other —
500 meters across the reddish brown volcanic
cinders — is a
breathtaking hike. Keck and Subaru,
As with the VLT,
plans call for the two
Kings of the Mountain
Keck telescopes to be used as a giant interferometer, assum-
ing their beams can be successfully brought to a single focus
with their wavefronts in phase. Along with several outrigger
telescopes, affectionately known as “sidekecks,” the ensemble
will then have the light grasp of a 14-m and the effective res-
olution of a 95-m telescope.
Right next door to Keck is its neighbor, Subaru, which has
the largest monolithic mirror on the is-
land. With a name that is Japanese for
Pleiades, Subaru is operated by the Na-
tional Astronomical Observatory of
Japan and saw first light in early 1999. I
captured a wide overall view of this tele-
scope (left) when it was preassembled in
February 1996 for its unveiling ceremony
at the cavernous Mitsubishi factory near
Tokyo. Its dome is very snug around the
telescope now.

©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Sky & Telescope August 2000 41