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TELESCOPES
These two domes house the twin Keck Telescopes perched high above the clouds on Mauna Kea (an extinct volcano) on the Big Island of Hawaii. Each dome contains a telescope with many mirror segments, which combine to give a light collecting area of 10 meters (about 10 yards) across. These are currently the largest light-collecting telescopes in the world, although the European Southern Observatory is building a series of four giant telescopes in Chile which will have a larger collecting area when their light is combined. With such telescopes, astronomers can detect the light of very distant (and thus faint) objects. (Courtesy of William Keck Observatory and Caltech) |
