(SNES) Uh oh - he's at it again....

[Les Coleman <colemans@riconnect.com>]

Friends,

Since I value you all highly, be forewarned that what follows are the 
random meanderings that occurred to me after some kid asked me "What the
biggest telescope?" Now that is a perfectly reasonable question for a 9 
year old to ask and I trotted out my standard answer which begins "It 
depends ...." wherein I proceed to cause mega-MEGO in the kids as I 
explain the differences between Hobby-Eberly, the twin Kecks and the 
Cerra Paranal Array, as well as Aricibo and the VLA.

Then in the dark of the night I started to think - a very bad idea. 
Simple mega-MEGO is suddenly replaced by megalomania. My wife swears she 
can smell my brain overheating - she says its smell like I'm burning old 
rubber bands in an ash tray. In any case, olfactory asides aside, I was 
off and running. I started to think big - no no no, not just big but 
hugely stupendously enourmously big. You know HUGE to nth power.

I started to think about really large telescopes in space. No, no, no - 
none of those puny things NASA is planning to put up. Something really
humungous. I added several stippulations - first it couldn't consume 
more than say 35% of the GNP - well 40% in a pinch for overruns. Next it 
had to be esthetically pleasing - I didn't want anything which would 
blot out half the sky. Finally, it had to be ecologically safe.

Well, much to my surprize I discover than we already have such a 
telescope available in the solar system. It weighs approximately 2 times 
10 to the 30th power kilograms, is solar powered, operates day or night, 
as well as warming the planets, holding them in orbit, melting comets 
and providing a solar wind. I speak of none other than our very own SUN. 
Yup! The SUN is without doubt the largest telescope (or at least the 
largest objective lens) in the solar system.

Combining several bits of trivia (such as the number of arc seconds the 
Sun's gravity bends a tangent light beam) one comes up with a really 
very long focal length telescope. In fact, the focal length is about
150 trillion meters - about a thousand AUs out. Now a thousand AUs isn't 
next door, in fact it is about 25 times as far as Pluto, but it is still 
within the Oort cloud making it truely a solar telescope. The gravity 
based lens actually forms remarkably large discs of the nearer
stars. As you know, even the largest Earth based telescopes form images 
which scarely reach a couple of millimeters. This baby forms star images
as large 1.5 meters for the nearest bright star [Rigil Kent - Alpha 
Centauri].

Sending a space probe with a camera couldn't cost very much. We have 
already sent Voyager I & II out beyond this point. There are a few 
piddling draw backs to my solar gravity powered humugo-scope[SGPHS]. 
Slewing from one star to another takes a lot of time. I suspect 23-24 
years to move thescope from a view of Betelgeuse to Antares (depends on 
rocket speeds).

Therefore, I humbly submit that once we get the Sky Theater up and 
running that our next target should be the implementation of a Frosty 
Drew Observatory SGPHS. Just think of the apature envy we'll generate.

Les Coleman
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