November 1, 2005, Mount Graham, AZ--The two mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) have produced their first scientific images of space. Led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Heidelberg, Germany), five German institutes participated, garnering a total of 25 percent of the observation time. Among them were the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy, Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, and for Radio Astronomy in Bonn.
The Large Binocular Telescope, positioned on the 3190-meter high Mount Graham in Arizona, is one of the most prominent scientific-technical projects in modern astronomical research. Its name describes it well: it has two giant mirrors, each of them with a diameter of 8.4 m. They are mounted onto the same surface, and focused, like field glasses, at the same time on distant space objects. The surface of the mirrors is polished with extreme precision, down to one 20 millionth of a mm. If an LBT mirror were enlarged to the size of Lake Constance in the Alps--just slightly larger than the area of New York City--the ‛waves' on the lake would be only one-fifth of a mm high. In spite of their size, each of the two mirrors weighs 16 tons. A classical telescope, on the other hand, at the dimensions of the LBT, would have thick mirrors weighing some 100 tons. It would be impossible to construct such a large classical telescope.
By combining the optical paths of the two individual mirrors, the LBT collects as much light as a telescope whose mirrors have a diameter of 11.8 meters. This is a factor of 24 larger than the 2.4-m mirrors of the Hubble Space Telescope. Even more importantly, the LBT has the resolution of a 22.8-m telescope, because it uses the most modern adaptive optics, superimposing pictures with an interferometric procedure. The astronomers are thus able to compensate for the blurring caused by air turbulence, and see into the universe much more clearly than Hubble.
LBT is a joint American-German-Italian project.