China Builds World's Biggest Fixed Spectrometer Telescope “LAMOST” - Gizmo Watch

China Builds World's Biggest Fixed Spectrometer Telescope “LAMOST” - Gizmo Watch: "National Astronomical Observatories from Chinese Academy of Sciences has completed their long awaited project “The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope or LAMOST”. Inspired by previous telescope Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it was build at a cost of $34.40 million. A diameter of 50 meters, with a total height over 58 meters, that is equivalent of two-story building of large-scale astronomical observation equipment, and with a gross weight over 700 tons, LAMOST is world’s biggest fixed spectrometer telescope. King of the spectrum is located 170 kilometers north-east of Beijing, the Chinese capital. Acording to Professor Donald York:
“LAMOST has 4,000 fibers at a shot, 5.5 times that of SDSS and a bigger advantage over anything else”"

Liquid-mirror Telescopes: Cheaper Option To Glass-mirror Finally Released - Gizmo Watch

Liquid-mirror Telescopes: Cheaper Option To Glass-mirror Finally Released - Gizmo Watch: "As the scientist community wishes to explore the farthest away spatial bodies, their urge for erecting bigger and better telescopes gets growing! But erection of mighty, scientific and automated telescopes is no easy task - they require funds to be poured in like water, along with human efforts. Owing to this reason, world’s first 4 meter wide liquid-mirror telescope based observatory is going to be erected in India by 2009. The International Liquid Mirror Telescope is going to be funded by Belgium and Canada and would be located on a mountaintop. Conceptually, liquid-mirror are based on simple property of fluid dynamics - spin a pool of fluid till it coincidentally rearranges itself to an exact parabolic shape, same as the glass mirror used for observation. These telescopes cost one-tenth of their glass-mirror counterparts of the same size and time required to erect them is also significantly low."

A Virtual Journey Through Space With Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope - Gizmo Watch

A Virtual Journey Through Space With Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope - Gizmo Watch: "Microsoft isn’t exactly known for launching free applications, but the Redmond based software giant is slowly but steadily launching more and more free apps for computer users in a bid to better its monopolistic image. Continuing in this vein, it has come out with its WorldWide Telescope app which will let all Windows operating system users view the huge number of images, captured in space by a chain of orbiting telescopes. For this to happen, Microsoft has put all the space images available into one big 12 terabyte server. These images are put together to form interactive guided tours. This, Microsoft hopes will give users the opportunity to delve into the hitherto unknown facets of outer space and learn a lot about what lies beyond our little blue planet. The entire WorldWide Telescope App is the brainchild of Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher very interested in outer space. Here’s hoping that Microsoft gives us many more wonderful free apps like the WorldWide Telescope.
Via: SeattleTimes"