From here, the expedition sets off for the mountain top. John Gage has come to Mauna Kea to see the role of networking technologies in the Gemini project, a multi-national effort to build twin 8.1 meter astronomical telescopes. Gemini one is here with its twin in Chile it will provide complete unobstructed coverage of both northern and southern skies. Telescope technology has come a long way since Galileo. The optics themselves can bend and flex and keep themselves in alignment, and so like sort of modern aircraft, each one of these systems, the secondary mirror, the primary mirror, the telescope drives, the enclosure that the telescope sits in, the actual mount all are controlled by independent computers, who are all talking to each other all the time.
Computer control allows the mirrors to shape as the atmospheric distortions of the light change.
It makes the image sharper, and that image is transmitted from here, by network, to astronomers around the world. The advantages are that you don't have to travel to Hawaii, which may sound like a disadvantage, but if you don't have the money to it, it means in the past you simply couldn't do your science. It also means that different people all over the world can collaborate in real time. Taking a global digital journey, together. We are the dot in dot com.