Posted on 06/08/2009 11:59:30 PM PDT by zeestephen
POSSIBLY the clearest skies on Earth have been found - but to exploit them, astronomers will have to set up a telescope in one of the planet's harshest climates...[Scientists] evaluated different factors that affect telescope vision, such as the amount of water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence...The team found that the Antarctic plateau offers world-beating atmospheric conditions - as long as telescopes are raised 20 meters above its frozen surface...[The Antarctic air is] drier than the Atacama desert in Chile [where some of the best telescopes in the world are currently located].
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Wonder how much a puddle jumper from S. America or Australia would cost? Are there even tourist trips available down there?
Tht’s because there’s no ozone to look through.>s
Most are by ship to the shore of Antarctica.
ML/NJ
“Yeah. Great Place for a telescope, if you only want to be able to study half of the sky.”
Actually one of the cooler (sigh) things about siting one down there would be looking at the deep southern sky, which has far fewer observations than the northern sky. The vast majority of telescopes are in the Northern Hemisphere.
For coverage, the space telescopes are hard to beat though. ;-)
Re: Seeing only half the sky
Interesting comment.
Since the Earth is almost a sphere, wouldn't the percentage of viewable sky be approximately equal from every point on the sphere?
Obviously the earth rotates each day, but wouldn't a person be able to “rotate” his view at the South Pole simply by doing a 360 degree turn?
I don't know the answer.
Zee
Think of a rotating egg. A telescope at the very top won’t get a changing view compared to the 360 degree rotating views a telescope at higher latitudes can view.
But it can view areas that have never been viewed as such before.
Viewable sky is probably different too, but I think the bigger issue is atmospheric interference.
The difference between sea level and the highest point on the earth's surface is over 29,000 ft, or about 5.5 MILES.
When you're talking about faint interstellar light, atmospheric water vapor, dust, etc. all take their toll. Miles of such interference make a BIG difference.
“Higher latitudes”—meant to say latitudes away from the pole.
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