Ramsey is one of the original inventors of the telescope, along with Daniel Weedman , formerly at Penn State and now at the National Science Foundation Division of Astronomical Science. So far, users of the telescope report exciting results. The first paper based on observations with the telescope was recently accepted by the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific . They discovered five quasars with redshifts between 2.9 and 4.2. As their work continued, the telescope has observed more than a dozen distant quasar candidates.
Quasars are the most luminous class of objects in the universe.
One of the quasars discovered by the telescope is so far away that the light we see from it began traveling toward Earth when the universe was only one-eighth of its current age. Penn State is leading the effort to develop the software required to calibrate the data and had a small role in constructing the spectrograph used for the telescope observation. Penn State assistant professor Michael Eracleous is overseeing the data-processing effort. His team consists of a number of Penn State faculty and students. It was dedicated in October 1997.