Telescope project gets help from Bill Gates [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Telescope project gets help from Bill Gates

The Associated Press
Friday, January 4, 2008

TUCSON, Arizona: A project to build a pioneering telescope in Chile got a $30 million boost Thursday with donations from Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, and a former Microsoft executive, Charles Simonyi.

Simonyi is donating $20 million and Gates $10 million to pay for three major mirrors that will be used in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a nearly $400 million project that will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights - something never done before.

Astronomers anticipate surveying the heavens for 10 years, with observations starting in 2015.

"People can find out what's going on everywhere in the sky, and no one has ever done that before, not even come close," said Donald Sweeney, manager of the LSST Project, a partnership headquartered in Tucson and split among 23 universities, national laboratories and private entities.

The telescope is to be built on 9,000-foot, or 3,000-meter, Cerro Pachon in northern Chile. It will take an image every 15 seconds nightly, and its camera - the world's largest and most powerful digital device - will read out the image in 2 seconds.

More:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/04/technology/04scope.php



Cerro Pachon, Chile





Live from Cerro Pachon:
http://nightskylive.net/cp/

Cerro Pachon, on map
The Southern Gemini Telescope:
http://www.gemini.edu/public/pachon.html