The page you are viewing is taken from an exhibit called MIRA: Exploring the Universe from the Central Coast.
The exhibit ran from 1 July through 24 September 2000 at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History.

Servicing the Hubble Space Telescope
from the Space Shuttle.

Servicing the MIRA Telescope from a ladder.

Astronomers were planning for a telescope in space before the first sputnik lifted above the Earth. Above the Earth’s interfering atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has provided astounding images of celestial objects at four times the best resolution measured at Chews Ridge. The HST can also view the heavens at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths that are blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere.

There is an enormous amount to be learned from the Universe. Having only a couple of the world’s largest telescopes and a spaced-based telescope would be like having only a few microscopes in the world. For many scientific studies, the quality of observations from Monterey County is just as good as those from space. And a space-based observation costs about 4,000 times as much as a ground-based one!

Site surveys confirm that Monterey County has some of the best ground-based sites in the U.S. for optical astronomy. Encroachment of growth (especially light pollution) from the Silicon valley corridor may endanger our outstanding observing conditions in the next century.

Often, for the most productive studies, a combination of space and ground-based observations is the best approach. An excellent example of such a synergy is the MIRA study of the gravitational lens, the Einstein Cross. Searching for the unpredictable changes in the brightness of images of the gravitational lens would be prohibitively expensive from the HST but affordable at MIRA. However, to analyze the MIRA images, an extremely high-resolution HST image is used as a template for image analysis.

Such studies are among the most fundamental in astronomy; they will measure the size and age of the Universe.

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© 2000 MIRA