Looking at the Sun

This is the famous McMath-Pierce solar telescope located on Kitt Peak.  It is the largest solar telescope in the world, and was built in 1962.  It is one hundred feet tall, and the diagonal structure is two hundred feet long to the ground, and then it goes underground, for another two hundred feet to the observing room where all the instruments are.

The image of the sun is captured by a device called a Heliostat, which is mounted on the top of the tower.  It is a flat mirror two meters in diameter, and it reflects the image of the sun down the long diagonal tube, to a 1.6 meter primary mirror.  There are also two other smaller, 36 inch heliostats that also reflect an image down the tube, so there can be three instruments in the observing room gathering data.

OK, so this is unreal.  I have visited this telescope before, but never imagined that one day I would be INSIDE the telescope!  Our guide took us inside to show us the other mirrors that capture and reflect the beam in its path.  Here we are underground, and about half way down the tube.

And in case you hadn't figured it out already, the view from the top of the tower was spectacular.  We could see for more than a hundred miles in the clear air of Arizona.  This was one astounding tour!