The South Pole Telescope

25:33>> so notice the Earth is rotating. Right. And this is from the vantage point of um M87. Okay. So it's like it's like I'm at M87 looking at the Earth. Yes. >> Now the Earth is tilted. >> Yes. >> And so notice Antarctica is always facing >> M87, right? Because because the Earth is tilted. So Antarctica is like always facing the constellation of Virgo, right? So the the the telescope in Antarctica on the South Pole is called the South Pole telescope. It's just always staring at M87. [laughter] And then and then the other guys are like are like picking and choosing like the filling in the data >> at time in the day things. >> Yeah. But it's just cool that like no matter what part of the year, right, because the Earth's tilt doesn't doesn't

26:13change. Yes. >> So no matter what part of the year, it's just going to keep staring at that spot in the sky. And fortunately with radio astronomy, it doesn't really mind staring at the sky during the daytime. >> Right. Right. So it's the the sun isn't really affecting radio astronomy as much unless optical optical optical obviously we can't see any stars during the day. Radio if you look you'll you'll be able to see stuff. >> We have our atmosphere and there's blocking happening and light and it's interfering. >> Yeah. Like the the sun is still a source of radio waves don't get me wrong but um it's not like getting scattered as much by the atmosphere as compared to you know like optical light. So, as long as you don't like just stare directly at

26:54the sun, you're good to go. >> Um, I just think that's it's such a cool thing that we've done as humanity. >> It's also a cool thing that we've figured out, right? Because you could just be like, "Oh, we can't build a 10 km wide telescope. I'm going to give up because this problem is insurmountable for us because we're not going to have the engineering capacity, the funding, and whatever." And it's like this is I think one of the beauties of the process that we talk about so much on the show is how can you do more with less? >> Yeah. >> And the ingenuity that arrives from if we can't do X, can we maybe do Y ultimately to get the same end result? And this is a perfect example of how,

27:34you know, we're not going to get the funding to do what we want to do, but we already have the resources to be pragmatic in getting to the same end result, which is this imaging task. >> Exactly. >> Uh which has given us this M87 um this beautiful, >> beautiful, beautiful image. >> Beautiful image. >> Right. And so now the other point that I just want to make is why radio, right? If we can do this with like just light at the end of the day, right? Light is light. Why don't we just like wait for the nighttime and then image with optical, >> right? Because the argument would be like some of our optical stuff is pretty tough. >> It's pretty tough, right? But we don't

28:14have optical interferometers. Not really. We've got a few >> which is meaning more like this large array of optical telescope optical telescopes. We have a lot. So the VA being a larger very the very large array of radio telescopes which are lower cost right uh and maybe you could argue lower data stream complexity and downstream