“If you’ve ever been blown away by an image of outer space, it’s a pretty safe bet it was taken by a spacecraft.”
Not the best opening for an article on modern astronomy 🙄
Amateur & professional ground-based astronomy continues to generate spectacular imagery & scientifically, cutting-edge ground-based telescopes will play a vital role well into the future, as the construction of the wide-field Rubin Observatory & the 39-m diameter European ELT demonstrate.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/11/space-telescopes-hubble-james-webb-nasa-astronomy
And I say this as someone who (a) works for a space agency which runs an armada of space telescopes, (b) has worked with Hubble & JWST & thus fully understands their power as well as their limitations, & (c) knows that ground-based astronomy is under threat from both terrestrial & space-based light pollution.
The idea that all astronomy can just “be done from space” is both wrong & potentially damaging to our research goals.
There are also some rather daft assertions in that article, including:
(a) Hubble was only finally launched due to lobbying by astronomers. Nope: it just took that long to build + Challenger
(b) Space is completely black. Nope: JWST is ultimately limited by the glow of the zodiacal light in our Solar System
(c) That the only advantage of JWST over HST when it comes to seeing the first galaxies is its collecting area. Nope: diffraction-limited resolution, redshift, & a cryogenic observatory
More daftness from the article -
"This happens because the rays of starlight are constantly being jiggled about by atmospheric turbulence and it means that no matter how good a telescope is in theory, it can never form a perfectly sharp image if it’s located on the Earth’s surface." The author should look up adaptive optics.
@AkaSci Sure, Adaptive Optics (AO) can mitigate the problems of atmospheric turbulence somewhat, but it has it's limits, so turbulence does continue to be a limitation for terrestrial telescopes. Which is to say, if speaking to laymen it seems like a potentially acceptable simplification to gloss over this mitigation.
Interestingly, there are some ideas for using spacecraft to markedly improve the AO of terrestrial telescopes.
