It has a twin truss design, seven cooling followers and — look forward to it — an azimuth dovetail stability system.
But there’s extra. For an additional 4 and a half grand, the producer will fortunately throw in an IRF90 Rotating Focuser.
Excited but? OK. So maybe such particulars will solely set pulses racing for true astronomy nerds. For the remainder of us, it’s sufficient to know that, after 32 years, Adler Planetarium’s observatory is getting a brand new state-of-the artwork telescope.
For now, the empty concrete observatory sitting on the japanese fringe of the planetarium seems to be like an deserted gun turret. The outdated telescope, hauled out of its residence in late October, is in protected storage.
“We are hunting for a new owner for the telescope,” stated Michelle Nichols, Adler’s director of public observing. “We have an organization that is considering our offer of a [free] telescope …. They are still thinking about it.”
In one sense, shopping for a brand new telescope is like shopping for a automobile.
“You find the size you want, and then you start figuring out who has got what features,” Nichols stated.
In one other sense, it’s not. There’s apparently no haggling on the worth.
“We have set prices — and they are very reasonable prices,” stated Richard Hedrick, president of PlaneWaves Instruments, the Michigan-based firm constructing Alder’s new telescope.
The firm builds 50 to 80 telescopes a 12 months ranging in value from $10,000 to about $650,000. They’re constructed for museums, NASA, in addition to the well-to-do.
“There is also the rich-guy market,” Hedrick stated. “We have lots of customers who are building houses for observatories. We have someone who made a lot of money in the dot-com [industry] and he’s building a cabin in the mountains. He’s building a state-of-the-art observatory because he loves science.”
Adler, or quite a bunch of donors, is paying about $100,000 for the planetarium’s new telescope.
The Adler’s new telescope — anticipated to be in place by mid-December. | Provided photograph.
“The optics will be better,” Nichols stated. “[Visitors] will see more details with something like Jupiter or Saturn or Mars.”
That’s principally as a result of the primary mirror, which gathers and focuses the incoming gentle, is about four inches wider on the brand new telescope, Nichols stated.
The scope is anticipated arrive in two crates in mid-December, Nichols stated.
Are folks as excited as they as soon as had been about peering on the evening sky? After all, children lately usually tend to ask for a cellphone or a laptop computer than a metallic tube mounted on a rickety tripod.
“If we could open that observatory every night of the year, we would because we know that people would show up,” Nichols stated.
“Seeing something with your own eye — there is nothing like it,” she added. “It is a visceral experience to be able to do that, and that’s the thing that gets people hooked on the subject.”