TRAPPIST-1, named for the telescope that was used to discover the three exoplanets, is a star that is much cooler, redder, and smaller than the Sun.
Then, out of nowhere, came the offer: Bring your white gloves and your screwdriver, and take apart the telescope that had been used by John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and descendant of the Massachusetts Bay Colony founder, to observe the transit of Venus in 1769.
Scientists have recently discovered some 140 Earth-like planets using the Kepler telescope that launched in January, 2009.
Customers can take their own photographs using the telescopes.
While the telescope that Lily uses is available to buy in stores, John Lewis seems to have shied away from a big product push despite the analyst's estimates that sales of a stuffed Monty the Penguin earned £18 million in revenue over the course of that campaign.
Astronomers who use the telescope for research claim that it has unique capabilities not likely to be replaced by other telescopes any time soon.
But Giants teammates said long afterward that, at the behest of Manager Leo Durocher, Franks was using a telescope that afternoon (and in the weeks preceding it) to steal the signs of opposing catchers so that Giants batters would know what pitch was coming.
"Many of the radio telescopes in use today were designed in the 60's and 70's before today's technological advances," said Dr. Seth Shostak of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a privately financed effort to detect evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, one of the groups that will use the telescope.
In 1983 Neugebauer helped to direct the Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRASS) mission, which successfully created the first infrared map of space and located some 350,000 sources of infrared radiation by using a telescope that was supercooled with helium in order to suppress its own infrared emissions.
The laser beams were attenuated using a half wavelength plate and expanded using a custom telescope that could be configured for both confocal illumination (collimated beam output) or a converging beam at the objective back focal plane.
