As I recall from school, your lead suit would need to be more than 3 lightyears thick to make the chance of a neutrino (that was already heading towards you) going through you fall to 50%.
The Rayleigh criterion gives a limiting resolution assuming monochromatic light. The quoted 16 mas is a demonstrated resolution for a broadband filter. So, I was ballparking things and they have achieved an awesome result for a relatively short wavelength! That resolution is just achieved for the inner 1 arcsec of the image, though.
Presumably you meant to say 14 miles, not 14 feet. Also, since the adaptive optic system acts on the near-IR light, let's shift the 500nm used to calculate the Rayleigh criterion to at least 1 micron, which doubles the limiting resolution to around 0.011 arcsec.
The issue is rotation of the sky about the line of sight axis. Whether the exposures are short or long, over time the sky will rotate more than what an in-camera system can compensate for (the amount of rotation depends on location/time/direction). Over these timescales a rotator that can perform larger movements is needed. This can be provided by an equatorial mount or an internal rotator.
I was also wondering about the stellar wind stripping away the atmosphere. Planets close enough to their stars to be tidally locked will experience more stellar wind than those farther away and dwarf stars have more flare events than stars like our sun does, exacerbating the problem (plus flares can release a lot of high energy photons, which can break apart structures like DNA).
The world is interconnected, especially science. Just sticking with medical imaging, a lot of work done in astronomy has crossed over and had direct impact on medicine. CT scans are one example (algorithms and code from astronomy), and if you've had lasik or been to an optometrist with one of those machines that automatically spits out a prescription (adaptive optics), you've benefited from technology developed for astronomy.
Money spent on one area doesn't mean the resulting innovations or knowledge stay there, they cross over and enrich other areas.
Haha, it must be inflation. Back when I was involved the 1TB number was the one being thrown around. Thanks for posting that link. IPAC is really doing well for themselves with all the new projects they're hosting.
Back when 10TB was enough space for the entire Sloan survey, Vera Rubin Observatory was expected to produce 1TB every night. They dug a trench up into the mountains to lay a fiber optic cable specifically (and only) for Vera Rubin.
It's not really about one being better than the other, just that they're designed for different purposes. Euclid is a survey telescope built to research dark matter, for which it has a large field of view so that it can build up a picture of the entire sky in all directions. JWST is focused more on investigating the early universe, for which it has a much larger primary mirror (gather more light), but has a lot of other capabilities as well.
Euclid has a much smaller primary mirror, and its spectroscopy capabilities are limited compared to JWST (it doesn't need all the same bells and whistles). It also can't observe as far into the infrared as well as Webb. However, as stated, it has a wide field of view and enough photometric color and spectroscopic resolution to do it's main job of measuring galaxy shapes and positions and their redshifts in support of investigating dark matter.
Just a quick note to say that JWST is not the first telescope to give us these kinds of views! There are numerous others, SOFIA, IRAS, IRTF, and Alma to name a just a few.
The encyclopedic CRC handbook used to (maybe still does?) list what different metals, minerals, and other materials taste like. It seems a lot of people felt taste was an important sense to make use of.
I take this progression to mean that the novice will design a part or subsystem that is good by itself. The more experienced engineer is thinking bigger by taking into account the effect of the larger design on the portion they are working on. The great engineer is thinking holistically and so also considers how the part affects the whole design.
The same thing applies, I think, to anyone who works on a team. The beginner thinks of the problem by itself. The more experienced member thinks of how the system will influence what they are building or doing. The senior member will think about how the thing they are doing/building will in turn affect the whole (and weigh the consequences).
I had a summer internship where I got bored and read wikipedia a lot. Reading about engines and transmissions there helped me a lot when I learned to drive stick. Being able to visualize what was mechanically happening gave me a little bit better intuition about what to do. I still stalled, of course, but I felt like I had a better roadmap on how to improve.
The fact that it's hard to know the inputs accurately and precisely doesn't make this any less of an equation. Given some inputs on one side, you get an output on the other. You might as well call y = mx + b an estimate.
Focusing on getting good detectors and optics in a great observing site is a more efficient use of resources than organizing, collecting, calibrating, troubleshooting, etc. a crowdsourced effort. Plus, I imagine the CMOS detectors they're talking about using are not cheap.
In some kinds of fishing, it seems they deploy nets and then collect them later, so this would help them not lose it in the first place. Also, location information is always good to have and is useful for more than just finding lost stuff.
Not to minimize the impact to ocean life and the environment, but lost fishing gear costs money. The upside of which is that there is direct financial incentive to recover lost gear. I know nothing about this space, but a former coworker started a company about ten years ago in part to allow fishers to track and recover their gear: https://www.blueoceangear.com/
"Unlike other forms of marine debris, fishing gear is specifically designed to catch marine life. Under certain conditions, derelict gear can continue to catch and kill organisms for years."
You're being naive, and haven't demonstrated that you know anything about astronomy, or optics in general, really. Astronomers are very cost-conscious, which is exactly why the decadal survey exists - to direct limited funding to projects with the most scientific bang for the buck. All options are considered and the fact that they're being done the way they are is because that is the most effective way to do it, not because people are 'stuck' in the old ways. Astronomy has always been about innovation.
From reading the article it seems likes they're using the fact that photons are Poisson distributed. Just like raindrops or particles emitted by radioactive decay, you can determine an average rate of flux and the probability distribution of where particles will hit your detector, but for any given moment, you don't know if a particle will hit at that instant, and you don't know where. With a super fast camera, they're recording many instantaneous snapshots to see if and where a photon has been detected.
An aside, but when it comes to electronic beam-steering, it's hard not to talk about LOFAR[1], a low-frequency radio interferometer for astronomy spread across Europe.
Saying that an investment strategy has averaged positive returns over 40+ years may be true, but is not necessarily useful information. Over very long periods of time, there are many strategies that will provide an average positive return. In this context (retirement spending), investors have to weigh long-term growth with the need to withdraw money from the portfolio every year to live on. Volatility is thus an important consideration.