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I'd be very interested to know if any of the people who strongly disagree with the above comment are professional astronomers, or physicists.
by chr1 7y ago
I'd be very interested to know if any of the people who strongly disagree with the above comment are professional astronomers, or physicists.
- mlyle 7y agoUh, being up above the atmosphere is great and all. But we also like having big apertures and lots of light gathering, which space telescopes don't have. We're not going to have a 39 meter scope with a high quality mirror in orbit anytime soon. Also, space telescopes are very expensive, so we have a very small number-- we're not going to ever have enough to look at as much of the sky as we'd like to look at. We've got hundreds of thousands of 0.3 meter scopes out there, employed by everything from outright amateurs to citizen-scientists to auxiliary observing and discovery for research astronomers. We can't give all these people time on orbiting telescopes.