Picture an optical telescope, a really good optical telescope, and you have to think big.

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They are the first planets discovered by the enormous Keck telescope in Hawaii, the sharpest optical telescope in the world.

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This, combined with a new digital camera developed for it by Mitsubishi Electric, will make it the most powerful ground-based optical telescope around.

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The Siding Spring Observatory, located high in a remote area, is home to Australia's largest optical telescope, the 3.9m diameter Anglo-Australian Telescope, as well as several others.

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Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis chatted with us, telling us why the company made the unusual decision to put its first orbital optical telescope up for grabs on Kickstarter.

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Thanks to observations made with the Gemini ground-based optical telescope in Hawaii, it quickly became clear that GRB130427A was superbright primarily because it lay only a few billion light years away.

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X-rays are easier to pinpoint than gamma rays, so BeppoSAX was able to give astronomers a position for the bursts that was accurate enough to aim a big optical telescope at.

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Water gobbles up microwaves (the heating that this causes is how microwave ovens work), so finding a good site for a microwave telescope is even harder than finding one for an optical telescope.

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That would give it a resolution of a few thousandths of an arc-second enough, were this an optical rather than a radio telescope, to see a boulder just a few metres across on the surface of the moon.

ECONOMIST: Radio telescopes

The best-known is probably the Hubble Space Telescope , which operates at optical frequencies.

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