re space marketing would be wonderfull on mon may gmt fcrary ucsu colorado edu frank crary said fc in article may olaf wellesley edu lhawkins annie wellesley edu r lee hawkins writes because of his doubtfull credibility as an astronomer modern ground based visible light astronomy what these proposed orbiting billboards would upset is already a dying field the ahh perhaps that s why we ve astronomers have just built meter ground based scopes and are studying designs for larger ones fc exactly what fraction of current research is done on the big fc visable light telescopes from what i ve seen or less fc down from amlost years ago that sounds like dying fc to me that doesn t seem like a fair comparison infrared astronomy didn t really get started until something like yrs ago it didn t explode until iras in gamma ray and i think x ray observations didn t really get started until the s i believe the same is true of ultraviolet observations in general and i know that extreme uv short of angstroms observations until the euve launched last year had almost no history except a few observations on skylab in the s twenty five years ago the vast majority of astronomers only had access to optical or radio instruments now with far more instruments available growth in some of these new fields has resulted in optical work representing a smaller fraction of total astronomical work seriously though you re never going to get a meter scope into orbit as cheaply as you can build one on the ground and with adaptive optics and a good site the difference in quality is narrowed quite a bit anyway fc that would be true if adaptive optics worked well in the visable fc but take a look at the papers on the subject they refer to anything fc up to microns as visable i don t know about you but most fc people have trouble seeing beyond microns or so there are fc reasons to think adaptive optics will not work at shorter fc wavelengths without truely radical improvements in technology hmm some of the folks in this department planning on using adaptive optics at the m at palomar for near infrared observations and microns might be surprised to hear this and isn t the ntt already pushing toward arcsecond resolution from a ground based site remember arcseconds was one of the selling points of hst e mail lazio astrosun tn cornell edu t joseph lazio phone icbm deg n deg w cornell knows i exist stop rape
