"Once assembled, all seven mirrors will work in concert as one monolithic 25.4-meter mirror—a diameter equal to the length of a full-grown blue whale—resulting in up to 200 times the sensitivity and four times the image resolution of today’s most advanced space telescopes."
That is a 1000 inch diameter mirror. Palomar Observatory was for decades the largest telescope on Earth at 200 inches. This new one gathers 25x the light. 1000 inches is 25 million times the light-gathering of a proper dark-adapted adult eye.
"a diameter equal to the length of a full-grown blue whale"
ReplyDeleteWTH kind of comparison is that? Oh, yeah, I'll just look in THE FISH TANK IN MY BACK HARD TO GET AN IDEA.
What a bunch of idiots.
"25.4 meters, slightly longer than 1/4th an American football field, or roughly 1/4 of a Football pitch in the rest of the world" would give nearly everyone in the world the idea. Almost no one, statistically speaking, has been close enough to a "full grown blue whale" to get an idea.