Sharing some wins! The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) lab in Monrovia. Last Friday, I arrived earlier than usual at the street fair in hopes of setting up two wall panels to hang my art instead of one. A high-level tech had visited my art booth a few weeks back, admiring my work, and mentioned he works on the TMT and had invited me for a private tour. He showed up and asked if I wanted to see it before I started setting up. I briefly thought about it and took the offer I felt like I had hit the jackpot to get a glimpse at the largest planned telescope in the northern hemisphere. It will be 12x sharper than Hubble and 4x sharper than JWST. It will have the light-gathering capability of the largest ten existing ground-based telescopes combined with the 492 mirrors in 1.4-meter segments The adaptive optics uses lasers to create guide stars, which the 492 mirrors move independently in nanometers thousands of times per second to account for atmospheric distortions in real time, creating the sharpest images. Each night, it can gather 90 terabytes of data. There are 12 sensors per mirror, two on each corner, as you can see from the rectangular cutouts where the gold-plated sensors will be installed. I stand under the substructure that houses 7 mirror sections, which there will be 70 of these sections to form the primary mirror. The wooden mockup of the secondary mirror is where the main laser will be housed. Polished mirrors in crates, each curved based on placement and numbered accordingly. Japanese Ohara glass is the best in the world. Canon polished these in Japan. The warehouse will be filled when the shipments arrive. I ended up only having one art wall up, but it was worth seeing TMT. I didn't lose out at all since I hit another sales record. A young collector purchased 4 pieces that drove the average night into the 2nd highest grossing night ever. During breakdown my guide at TMT walked by saying being in his field he'd not seen astrophotography like mine and when TMT resumes, he will get me a job with him. For now, he's going back to GMT. I'm blessed beyond measure. #space #astrophotography #astro #TMT #art #NASA #JPL
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