• Question: How many big telescopes are there, where are there, and how good are they?

    Asked by lisaloo to Kate on 19 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Kate Husband

      Kate Husband answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I’m not sure exactly but I’ll list the big ones I can think of. The dish size will get bigger for the longer wavelengths but at the same wavelength the bigger the dish the more light you can pick up and the better it is.

      Optical Telescopes (that’s using visible light i.e. what we can see with our eyes):
      Gemini North and South, 8m diameter dishes, in Hawaii and Chile
      VLT (Very Large Telescope), 4x 8m sized dishes, in Chile (I’ve been to this one and used it.)
      Keck telescopes, 2x 10m dishes in Hawaii
      Hubble Space Telescope, 2.4m, in space!
      Subaru, 8m, in Japan

      Infrared (so what your tv remote uses):
      UKIRT (UK infrared telescope), 15m dish, in Hawaii
      JCMT (James Clerk Maxwell Telescope), 15m dish in Hawaii (I’ve been to this one too.)

      Radio:
      Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, 76m dish, in Manchester
      ALMA, 64x 12m or 7m, in Chile

      X-ray:
      Chandra, in space
      XMM-Newton, in space

      So there are lots of telescopes, generally one in the north and one in the south at every wavelength.

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