03-18-2016, 07:11 PM
MarkP,
"So all the astronomy professionals pushing for the TMT, spending more than a billion dollars on it just don't know what they are talking about but us armchair astronomers on Punaweb do? Whoodathunkit? Me, I would have been embarrassed to voice such an opinion. Shows how little I know."
One of the main hopes for the TMT is that it is operational during the same time the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is making observations. It's one of the main reasons the TMT board has given a deadline to the state in order to know if the project can proceed (there are others, but scientifically, this is a very high priority). There has always been a synergy between space and ground-based telescopes. In many cases the space-based telescope discovers something interesting but doesn't have the instruments to do a thorough follow-up, so ground-based telescopes take over. In some cases it's the other way round, but usually it's the former. Without that ability for ground-based follow-up, the JWST won't fulfill its full potential.
The JWST will have a limited lifetime in space, about a decade, so it's not something that can be put off until later.
Just thought you'd be interested in that.
In the meantime, there's some weird guy in Pahoa telling the entire professional astronomy community how they've got it all wrong while blatantly making stuff up. You'd think that if you want to bluff a bunch of people with astronomy-related gibberish and gobbledygook, the last group you'd choose is professional and experienced astrophysicists.
"So all the astronomy professionals pushing for the TMT, spending more than a billion dollars on it just don't know what they are talking about but us armchair astronomers on Punaweb do? Whoodathunkit? Me, I would have been embarrassed to voice such an opinion. Shows how little I know."
One of the main hopes for the TMT is that it is operational during the same time the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is making observations. It's one of the main reasons the TMT board has given a deadline to the state in order to know if the project can proceed (there are others, but scientifically, this is a very high priority). There has always been a synergy between space and ground-based telescopes. In many cases the space-based telescope discovers something interesting but doesn't have the instruments to do a thorough follow-up, so ground-based telescopes take over. In some cases it's the other way round, but usually it's the former. Without that ability for ground-based follow-up, the JWST won't fulfill its full potential.
The JWST will have a limited lifetime in space, about a decade, so it's not something that can be put off until later.
Just thought you'd be interested in that.
In the meantime, there's some weird guy in Pahoa telling the entire professional astronomy community how they've got it all wrong while blatantly making stuff up. You'd think that if you want to bluff a bunch of people with astronomy-related gibberish and gobbledygook, the last group you'd choose is professional and experienced astrophysicists.