Re: Better Lucky than smart

We went down to=the Magellan telescope (6.5 m) with Wendy Freedman who is a rock star cosm=logist. She recently came to U of Chicago. Once th= dovening was over, they told us that they were going to do something that=had only been done once before in history. One of the geniuses had a=opted an eyepiece to the telescope and we were going to look through it wi=h the naked eye. Turns out that the human eye can (still) do s=me things better than optics. What they had done was developed '=daptive optics' for the secondary mirror such that they were able to r=shape the mirror many times per second and thereby correct for atmospheric=disturbances from moment to moment. This allows the human eye =o observe at a resolution unprecedented in history. Margot was=the 12th person to do this in history, I was the 13th. We obse=ved Sirius (8 light years). It was quite a show. Before turnin= on adaptive optics (580 points on the secondary mirror that can change th= shape of the mirror in order to consolidate the light of the first mirror-into a readable image) you only saw a blur of light. Flip de switch =nd voila, a tight image of the star. This, of course, means a=solutely nothing, but it was better than watching the Bearss.

tjp

grEAT im off to ted conference. yo=?