u3a

Littleborough

10 September - Astronomy Group

Today's session was about Space Telescopes and started with a look at the Rubin Observatory. Named after Dr. Vera C. Rubin, who was an American astronomer whose work provided convincing evidence for the existence of unseen "dark" matter in the Universe.

Situated in Chile, its main task is to conduct an astronomical survey of the southern sky every few nights, creating a ten-year time-lapse record, termed the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, it uses the largest digital camera ever built. We viewed some of the first images taken by the camera.

We then moved onto other space telescopes such as Hubble, John Webb Space telescope and the Nancy Gray Roman space telescope, comparing what they do and how they can work together to fill in gaps.