Mucho telescopes.

A bright early start to the day (7 AM) no doubt had everyone loathing daylight this morning, but those sentiments were quickly washed out by the instruments we had the privilege of witnessing up on Mt. Hopkins. The first telescope we saw was MMT...the only word is wow. I said before that the 61" Kuiper was the size of a small truck...this thing is the size of 4 school buses rolled together. Heres it from the outside for some perspective (borrowed from google):

See that big dark circle near the bottom? Primary mirror, heres a sneak peek they gave us up close. The little burn mark on the bottom left is from the last aluminum resurfacing. Diameter is 6.5 meters (21 feet):

The little crosshair structure in the center of that big square on the end of the telescope is the secondary mirror. Its 3 feet across, they were servicing it while we were there:

And the glorious underbelly where the monstrous CCD and Spectrograph imagers are mounted, cooled by liquid nitrogen:

A quasar is a VERY distant, dim object at the visible reaches of our universe. Normal household telescopes can barely detect them. This monster was discovering 60-80 of them EVERY NIGHT in the height of its use. It rarely goes a single night without being occupied.

We saw some other smaller (similar in size to the one we used) telescopes belonging to the Smithsonian Institution while up on the mountain, all of which were just not as cool as the MMT or the Gamma Death Machine, or as they call it, the VERITAS Gamma Ray Telescope array. That was definitely the other highlight. High-energy gamma rays enter the atmosphere and bounce off air particles, emitting Cherenkov radiation which is picked up by these massive mirror arrays:

There's four of them, so they can pinpoint where the radiation comes from. This trip has cemented in my head two things:

-Technology, especially in the US, is impressive to say the least. A lot of great minds go into these projects and the outcomes are repeatedly stunning. However,

-Though I realize the value of scientific endeavor to great lengths, I can't help wishing that the same money and resources resulting in the above photographs could benefit the 1/3 of the world without electricity. Documenting high-redshift gamma sources, while revealing much about the nature of the Universe, do little to benefit starving homeless Palestinians or Ethiopians drinking ditch water just to stay alive.

This is all for tonight. Peace.