Hans Lippershey is commonly recognized for creating the telescope in the early 1600s.
Back then, it was a simple instrument consisting of a tube containing two lenses.
Now, today, because of technology, ingenuity and precision craftsmanship, we now have telescopes able to bring objects from the farthest depths of space into focus.
I'm John Hill. I'm the technical director here at LBT.
LBT stands for Large Binocular Telescope.
This telescope has two big mirrors on the same mounting, and that's the main thing that makes it different from other big telescopes.
Because this telescope can bring the light from the two sides together in the center, we can get three times the resolution of what a regular eight-meter telescope would get.
A telescope this big can see basically to the edge of the universe -- objects that were around 13 billion years ago, more or less.
We put the telescope up here on a high mountaintop because it's above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere.
All that silver building rotates around for the telescope to view different parts of the sky.
After sunset, we'll open the doors.
Each of these big mirrors has a surface accuracy of a millionth of an inch.
You don't think of a millionth of an inch too much every day, but that's about one twentieth of a hair.
Each of the two mirrors is 8.4 meters, or 27 feet, across. That weighs about 16 tons.
And then the whole moving telescope is about 800 tons.
It's a very big telescope, and you say, "Eight hundred tons, ah, it's a behemoth. It's this very heavy thing."
But, for a telescope this size with 110 square meters of collecting area, it is very lightweight and very precise.
It moves on these big bearings that are machined to a precision of about 20 microns. That's about half a hair.
And that's smoother than your average machined surface.
There are four motors on each axis and then a computer that's controlling those motors.
The computer knows exactly how the Earth is rotating. It knows what the refraction in the air is doing.
It tracks to a precision of about a hundredth of an arcsecond.
It knows everything it needs to know to make a smooth track for where that star goes, and it's all very carefully balanced.
So, that relatively small motors can move it around the sky.
So, it works just like this camera that you guys have here.
We have to have a steady mount and we have to have good focus.
And then we've got one more trick that you guys don't have, which is we have adaptive optics.
We measure the turbulence that's coming down through the atmosphere, and then on the secondary mirror, we put the reverse of that shape and we cancel out that turbulence.
So, we're seeing planets that we haven't seen before and we're making better images of planets that people discovered with other telescopes.