CrazyNeutrino said:
World’s biggest solar telescope set for 2019 completion in Hawaii
The US$344 million Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is designed to image the surface of the Sun in unprecedented detail and help scientists address fundamental questions about solar physics when it opens sometime in 2019. The DKIST has just entered the next phase in its construction, with a consortium of eight UK universities and businesses tasked with producing the telescope’s all-important cameras. Once complete, it will be the biggest solar telescope in the world – dwarfing current titleholder Big Bear Solar Observatory in California and edging out the 4.07 m (13.12 ft) European Solar Telescope that’s also currently under construction.
This is new. I hadn’t heard of this. My favourite ground-based solar telescope is the one on the Canary Islands.
Here’s some more on the “European Solar Telescope that’s also currently under construction”.
“The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a pan-European project to build a next-generation 4-meter class solar telescope, to be located in the Canary Islands. It will use state-of-the-art instruments with high spatial and temporal resolution that can efficiently produce two-dimensional spectral information in order to study the magnetic coupling between the deep photosphere and upper chromosphere. In May 2011 EST was at the end of its conceptual design study. The European Solar Telescope is often regarded as the counterpart of the American Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope which is currently being constructed.”
There’s a planned “Chinese Giant Solar telescope” that may end up even bigger “CGST will be an Infrared and Optical solar telescope. Its spatial resolution is equivalent to an 8 m-diameter telescope, and the light-gathering power equivalent to a 5 m-diameter telescope.”
