Large Binocular Telescope at Work

It's a regular Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) bonanza over at the website of Popular Mechanics magazine. The $120 million LBT, which is essentially two telescopes in one, will have 25 times the light-collecting area and 10 times the image resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. This greater capacity will allow it to study cosmological phenomena at even greater detail, allowing us to answer elusive questions about the nature of the universe. It will even be able to peer back at objects that "date back to the dawn of time" (which may be a bit of hyperbolic melodrama, but it sure sounds neat!).

The website features a nice PDF describing the LBT's design in fairly easy-to-understand language. In addition, the there are some photos of its construction, and of it being moved to its home on Arizona's Mount Graham.