Today, the largest optical telescopes are the twin Keck Telescopes in Hawaii, with 10-meter mirrors that gather the faint light from distant galaxies.

The Keck Observatory's two telescopes are nothing short of engineering marvels, each featuring a 32-foot-wide (10-meter) primary mirror comprising 36 precisely aligned hexagonal segments.

Techniques have been developed for the Keck telescopes in Hawaii or the GTC in the Canary Islands, but these telescopes have only ~35 segments to cophase to make a perfectly smooth primary mirror.

The Keck telescopes’ mirrors and optics are fine, but the radial pads and brakes that support the 300-ton structures on their mounts must be removed and replaced, an observatory spokeswoman, Laura ...

The 36 mirror segments of the 10 meter Keck telescope cost $170 million. The cost of a SpaceX Starship space telescope with a 9 meter mirror might only be about $250-500 million each.

Ito said she is also grateful for the college’s partnership with Las Cumbres Observatory, whose technicians cleaned the Keck Telescope mirrors this summer.

The telescopes and instruments will be returned to full functionality as soon as possible. As of Monday afternoon, summit technicians report that the primary mirrors of both Keck telescopes are ...

Currently, only the 3-meter Shane Telescope at UC’s Lick Observatory has an operational laser guide star that astronomers are using for observations. Within the next few months, however, researchers ...

The Thirty Meter Telescope Corp. says this will give their telescope nine times the collecting area of the largest optical telescopes in use today — the twin W.M. Keck telescopes built on Mauna ...

When Hilton Lewis began working at the W. M. Keck Observatory in 1986, astronomy was a very different field. Lewis, who is retiring from Keck at the end of the month after 37 years, the last nine ...