An extraordinary set of telescopes.

These are four 8.2 meter telescopes.

My talk is Flapping Birds and Space Telescopes.

And finally, for future endeavors, there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy ground based telescopes, and there are three space based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy.

The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies.

All four telescopes at the Sutherland observatory were scheduled to observe the event.

These initiatives complement the efforts made routinely with small and medium sized telescopes.

So, in fact, you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the Earth.

Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes, and of course three more planets were discovered.

The Very Large Telescope is one of these things that astronomers do they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively.

20 years ago, 30 years ago, only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space.

And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time.

Although space borne telescopes cannot be made as large and powerful as can terrestrial telescopes, improved viewing geometry and observation conditions enable improved access to certain types of object, such as Atens and Inner Earth Objects that, due to their proximity to the Sun in the sky, are often difficult to observe.

The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert.

There are some places you can't look because of our own galaxy, or because there are no telescopes available to do it.

This is the Keck observatory. It hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters, which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court.

And on a much longer time scale, what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes, because, remember, bigger is better in astronomy.

He said, The explorers of 2012, if there is anything left to explore, will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes.

They cover issues such as announcements, the results of observing campaigns and the observing schedules of large telescopes performing observations of very faint objects.

They draw pictures of what they're observing with their eyes, through technology like telescopes and microscopes, and also what they're thinking about in their minds.

But it turns out these telescopes, or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise.

Now, this is wonderful, because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope, the smaller the detail that we can see.

And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

And these are in the form of sensory apparatus telescopes, microscopes reasoning apparatus various ways of thinking and, most importantly, in the ability to change perspective on things.

Their work includes observation campaigns for physical characterization of NEOs using major ground based and space borne astronomical telescopes, for which observation time is awarded on a competitive basis.

The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe.

I was there to view something called a long duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up.

Educator Roy Gould and researcher Curtis Wong show a sneak preview of Microsoft s WorldWide Telescope, which compiles images from telescopes and satellites to build a comprehensive, interactive view of our universe.

Norwegian companies are involved in developing and building the International Space Station, the Ariane 5 launchers, space telescopes, spacecraft for exploring other planets, Earth observation satellites, communication satellites and navigation satellites.

Another of CARA apos s experiments is on the Cosmic Background Radiation Anisotropy at the end of the fiscal year, it consisted of a suite of two telescopes designated PYTHON and VIPER.

And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang.

In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect.

Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today the telephone.

Observations of gas clouds associated with the high redshift quasar PC 1643 4631A using the 42 and 12 meter radio telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO Kitt Peak, Arizona) have revealed the presence of carbon monoxide emission.

And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever.

We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat. That's a great first step, but what's the second step? The second step is that we see one heading toward us, we have to stop it. What do we do?

We have astronomers in place with telescopes looking for them. We have smart people, very, very smart people, who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem, and we have the technology to do this.

The prototype 3 meters diameter LMMT now in operation at NASA apos s JSC is the 17th largest telescope in the world. It was built at a cost of about 500,000 1 100th the cost of comparable Earth based astronomical telescopes.

For centuries, astronomers believed that the Milky Way made up the entire universe. Hubble was among the first to show that the fuzzy patches in the sky seen through telescopes were other galaxies, not distant parts of the Milky Way.

Now, six amateur astronomers, working with the Internet, with Dobsonian digital telescopes which are pretty much open source with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years, the Internet they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago.

And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail.

The SETI Institute's Jill Tarter makes her TED Prize wish to accelerate our search for cosmic company. Using a growing array of radio telescopes, she and her team listen for patterns that may be a sign of intelligence elsewhere in the universe.

Four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes.

All over the planet, giant telescopes and detectors are looking for clues to the workings of the universe. At the INK Conference, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy tours us around these amazing installations, taking us to some of the most remote and silent places on Earth.

With new data from the Keck telescopes, Andrea Ghez shows how state of the art adaptive optics are helping astronomers understand our universe's most mysterious objects black holes. She shares evidence that a supermassive black hole may be lurking at the center of the Milky Way.