With all the advancements from the boom of the techno-age, do any professional astronomers still study the stars at an observatory using conventional tools? You know, those classic optical tools called telescopes? Or, is that era left behind for the amateurs? (And even then, the amateurs can go high-tech more easily than ever before.)
Lost in Space,
Well, our atmosphere is opaque or nearly so to the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum – and a good thing, too: microwaved food, sunburn from UV, are things we should not need to protect from the instant we emerge from our caves.
As I understand it, there are two large “windows” in the spectrum: one covering a portion of the radio spectrum, and hence giving rise to ground-based radio-astronomy, and one covering the visible spectrum and extending a short way into the infrared, covering traditional astronomy and modern work in the IR.
Someone much more in tune with it could say what the Hubble is capable of, but I gather that it does both visible-spectrum and other-frequency observations. Satellites above the ionosphere handle IR, UV, microwave, X-ray and gamma ray range spectra
So it’s not that visible-light astronomy is neglected, rather that it’s supplemented by things we weren’t able to do until about 50 years ago.
The OP makes a distinction between professionals and amateurs, but I think that in some areas of astronomy there is overlap – that is, many objects (comets? supernovas?) are first noticed by amateurs using earth-based, visible-spectrum telescopes. Then, the professionals can direct, say, the Hubble toward the object for more of an in-depth analysis.
Recently, PBS showed Seeing In The Dark–a film about astronomers. We saw a bit of history & what the pros are up to. But much of the film was about amateurs. The sky is big & the pros can’t watch it all; hobbyists can make real contributions. (Of course the pioneers of astronomy were “amateurs” as well.)
It’s a lovely film with a soundtrack by Mark Knopfler. And a fascinating website.
Sitting down and looking through a telescope is no longer an effective way to do large scale observing. However given the developments in large scale, earth bound telescopes like OWL and actual recent builds like the Keck telescopes astronomers do have a use for them. However it’s the CCD ‘eyes’ that gather the light and present it through software.
I worked for several years at an observatory looking for asteroids. All the telescopes I know of use CCD cameras instead of eyepieces and film. There may be a couple out there not using CCD cameras, but not that I know of.
The interesting stuff is coming out of what they’re doing with CCD images; how they can be added together over time, comparing images in software over time and looking at the changes, etc. One place I know of takes thousands of CCD pictures in a night, then compiles the images to remove the effects of the atmosphere and camera noise to get amazingly clear pictures. It’s all about getting a good CCD camera and good software together to get more than just a single snapshot.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t any large telescopes still using nothing but optics and film, I just don’t recall hearing about any.
This is very true. Also, amateurs (“backyard astronomers”) have been using CCDs for a very long time, well before they were incorporated into digital cameras. We still love to observe directly through the telescope, as things are so gorgeous and amazing to see directly, but also can take pictures at the same time.
Astronomers do still use ground-based optical telescopes for research. Mr. Neville does, for one- he sometimes goes to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and does optical observations.
What they don’t do is actually look through the telescopes. The human eye is lousy for taking any kind of quantitative data (this is usually what they’re after), and the available methods of recording data taken by eye (writing it down or sketching something) are lacking as well.
Film (or, more usually, glass photographic plates) have problems as well. One obvious problem is needing to mess around with chemicals and breakable glass plates, which you don’t have to do if you use a CCD. These days, most astronomy majors don’t learn how to use and process photographic plates. Mr. Neville did (he was an undergrad from 1990-1994), but I didn’t (undergrad 1993-1998), and I’m pretty sure every observational astronomy class subsequent to mine didn’t use plates.
A less obvious problem with plates or film is that the response of photographic chemicals isn’t linear- if Star A is twice as bright as Star B, A won’t appear twice as bright on the plate as B. This makes interpreting the data from the plates a pain. CCDs don’t have this problem.
If the OP is asking whether astronomers spend much time actually looking through a telescope, the answer has been given: no - it’s far too useful to record what is seen and subject it to detailed analysis.
If the question is whether ground-based telescopes are still important, the answer is absolutely. One of the important reasons is the development of adaptive optics, which allow the distortions due to the atmosphere to be seriously reduced.
I was told by an astronomer friend that in the late 1980s it was widely believed that the limits of ground-based astronomy in optical wavelengths had been reached - that the future belonged only to space-based telescopes. But adaptive optics have changed that, and now the future is thought to be bright.