Session C6: History of Telescopes

The Bionic Telescope

Four hundred years after children in a spectacle makers workshop accidentally discovered the telescope, the development of this device has been a continuous replacement of the ``natural'' by the deliberate. The human eye is gone. The lens is gone. The tube is gone. The dome is on the verge of going. The size of the optics are ceasing to be set by transportation limits. Adaptive optics are preferred to stable optics. We deliberately break the Lagrange invariant. We focus on lasers instead of stars, and natural observing environments are being replaced by adaptive environments. The goals for the new ground based telescope encompass the oldest and newest ideas, to find signs of life elsewhere, and to find how all the universe developed.   

Radio Telescopes - A Technological Saga Sparked by Serendipity

This talk presents the history of radio telescopes beginning with the accidental discovery of radio signals from outer space by Karl Jansky in 1933. The design of radio telescopes and their receivers has been driven by the availability of new technology. Examples are presented of various types of radio telescopes and advances in sensitivity, angular resolution, and frequency coverage that have resulted from new technologies. The talk concludes with a look at some of the latest radio telescopes to be completed, in construction, or under design.   

Black Holes, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy: Measuring the Invisible through X Rays

X-ray telescopes allow us to ``see'' the high energy radiation from objects that cannot be seen at other wavelengths including black holes and the very hot gas in galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Since soft X-rays are absorbed by our atmosphere, X-ray detectors must be flown above most of the Earth's atmosphere. The first orbiting X-ray telescope flew on Skylab in the early 1970's and recorded images of the Sun on film. Observing fainter X-ray sources required both the development of large, high-incidence mirrors and the development of electronic detectors capable of measuring the arrival of an X-ray photon in two dimensions. This talk will review the development of X-ray observatories from the early Einstein observatory through the current Chandra, SWIFT and XMM-Newton missions. While X-ray observations have changed our views in many areas of astronomy from stars to quasars, this talk will focus on the advances in our knowledge of supermassive black holes, dark matter and dark energy.