Re:The Billion-Dollar Telescope Race
by onion2k on Wednesday September 03, 2014 @06:26AM
(#8262282)
The GMT telescope has mirrors 8.4 meters across with a fault tolerance of 19 nanometers. If you were to scale that mirror up to the size of Earth, the biggest imperfection would be just 2.8 centimetres high. That is amazing.
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For another perspective on that size, it's a mirror between 4 and 5 times your height, to a fault tolerance of less than 200 hydrogen atoms (or about 60 SiO2 molecules., if I have my calculations right)