The Vatican Observatory is located inside the palazzo, complete with a telescope and a world-class collection of meteorites.
To achieve the same result of Alma with a traditional telescope, scientists would need to build one so big, that it would take up 15 sq km in surface space.
When Dr Koechlin and his team pointed it at Mars they could distinguish that planet's two tiny moons a task which would require a Newtonian telescope with a mirror at least 30cm across.
Similarly, long-term sky surveys and supernova searches can be done with a zenith-pointing telescope: over the course of a year, the telescope can observe an entire band of the sky.
Combine a state-of-the-art telescope with a 268-megapixel camera, point it at the sky, add in a bit of calculation and you could end up with a gorgeous photo of the Carina Nebula.
ENGADGET: Visualized: Carina Nebula captured with a 268-megapixel camera
With the help of a telescope, it then identifies chemical elements in the vaporized atoms.
Stargazers in Australia, Asia and Eastern Europe could see the asteroid with the aid of a telescope or binoculars, but it never got closer than 17, 100 miles to our planet's surface.
Depending on local weather, it may be visible from Eastern Europe, Australia and Asia, with binoculars or a moderately powered telescope, space-agency officials said.
Two telescopes positioned 100 metres apart, for example, can then be used to measure the position of a star with the same accuracy as a single 100-metre telescope.
Use a photographic plate to record an image from a zenith-pointing telescope, and you will end up with a streaky image, as a result of the earth's rotation.
The most popular theory holds that dark matter is made up of relatively heavy particles which, when they encounter one another, "annihilate" with a flash of light that the Fermi telescope can see.
Galileo was afflicted with a cold and crazy mother after he made his first telescope, she tried to bribe a servant to betray its secret so that she could sell it on the market!
On Sunday, mission specialists Michael Massimino and Michael Good had to contend with a handrail blocking their access to the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), resorting in the end to tearing it off with brute force.
In 1918, he began excavating the rock below the soil, fashioning everything from a bedroom (complete with a child's cradle), to a 30ft-tall, 60, 000lb coral telescope, all in honour of Agnes.
With the launch of the RadioAstron telescope on board a Zenit-2SB rocket this morning, Russia has embarked on the first stage of a plan to create the largest radio telescope yet.
That's exactly what the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile did recently with its brand new VLT Survey Telescope -- just a portion of the resulting inaugural image is shown above.
ENGADGET: Visualized: Carina Nebula captured with a 268-megapixel camera
Astronomers captured the spectra of the two record breakers with a 3.5-metre (11.5 feet) telescope, located at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, also the site of the SDSS telescope.
But what is possible is to build many smaller dishes spaced a long way from one another, and to link them with clever computer algorithms so that they behave as if they were a single giant telescope.
ECONOMIST: The Square Kilometre Array: Divide and rule | The
It is also grappling with a big cost overrun on another of its top priorities - the James Webb Space Telescope - and for which the shortfall will have to be picked up by programmes across the agency, perhaps even human spaceflight.
And when its aluminium coating is replaced with silver in a year or two's time (a huge vacuum-chamber housed at the telescope's base will be used to deposit metallic vapour on to the mirror's reflecting surface), it will be able to see into the infra-red with equal clarity, opening up a much neglected area of astronomy.
Together with an amateur astronomer friend from California, Mandel has traveled to Australia and set up a high-powered telescope, mount and CCD camera in Lee's own backyard observatory, which they've dubbed the Australian-American Imaging Station.
This isn't the first time the ESO has shown a love for large captures: it managed to stitch together a massive 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way out of thousands of photographs taken with its VISTA telescope earlier this fall.
ENGADGET: Visualized: Carina Nebula captured with a 268-megapixel camera
The world's most powerful neutrino telescope, IceCube, uses Antarctic ice as the detector volume, with electronic equipment sunk throughout a cubic kilometer of ice -- enough water to fill a million swimming pools -- to detect signals from neutrinos interacting with the ice.
This, combined with a new digital camera developed for it by Mitsubishi Electric, will make it the most powerful ground-based optical telescope around.
In the book, Sirtori describes a meeting with an aged spectacle maker called Juan Roget in Gerona who he described as the real inventor of the telescope.
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