Transcript

INSTRUCTOR:

Here at Tenerife, I was out the other night, and a constellation that's prominent at the moment here is Orion. And this is what I could see just with my own dark-adapted eyes at this nice, clear observing site.

So we've got the four main stars of Orion. Rigel, Saiph, Bellatrix, and Betelgeuse. We've got the three stars of Orion's belt. And I can just about make out the sword and a faint fuzzy patch in the middle of Orion's sword. That's the Orion Nebula. With binoculars, immediately I can see the detail of the individual stars in the sword, and as well as that, begin to see the structure of the nebula itself.

So taking this process one step further, we can use the 350-millimetre aperture of COAST to collect yet more light, seven times more aperture than the binoculars. So collecting about 50 times as much light to see those ever fainter objects.

The other advantage that we've got with COAST is that instead of the retina of my eye, we're using a sensitive CCD camera, which can also collect light over a period of time in a time exposure. So again, we're increasing the light collecting ability of our equipment.

So with COAST, we can again increase the magnification and the resolution, but the primary purpose of building bigger and bigger telescopes is this increase in light collection power. And these are the kind of results that you can achieve with a telescope of the size of COAST. And you can see now the incredible amount of detail that we've got in the Orion Nebula here.

So we can take this process to extremes and go up into space with the 2.4-metre main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. But as you're about to find out, you'll be able to achieve some amazing images using the 350-millimetre main mirror of the COAST telescope here at this wonderful observing site on the mountainside at Tenerife.