A NIGHT ON MOUNT WILSON

A Chaos Manor Special Report

August 17, 1999

 

Fair Warning: what you see are thumbnails, but some of the pictures are fairly large. One of these days I'll find a way to run a batch file compressor on them that will chop them all down to VGA or so. For now, you have been warned.

 

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Begin at Chaos Manor. That's my desk and chair. The window looks out at the oriole/humming bird feeder.

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That's Larry Niven at my desk. We're just finishing The Burning City for about the 5th time but this time it really is done.

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Up on Wilson. That's Marilyn Niven, with Los Angeles in the background.

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Those are the solar telescope towers.

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And that's the dome for the 100 inch. That doesn't sound like much but with adaptive optics--the rubber telescope--and the splendid seeing from Mount Wilson they get resolutions better than Hubble gets from space.

Of course Hubble's discovery of the real size of the universe was done from this telescope...

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This isn't a room it's an instrument: the light pipes will bring in the light from the interferometer array to this place, where the light paths will be adjusted to fractions of a micron errors so the beams can combine. When they are done the resolution will see a footprint on the Moon. From here.