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looks ok to me, loading error?
i'm seeing the same, it certainly looks like the intentional blurring that google maps does for sensitive things: https://imgur.com/RqjnQTo
Note, Sac Peak is nowhere near the other solar observatory in Kitt Peak, AZ, and it is a daytime observatory as opposed to the much better-provisioned nighttime observatory at nearby Apache Point, NM - where the relatively-new Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope is.
It was a monastic lifestyle on the mountain there, and as the NSF has been backing out of some of its older ground-based observatories in pursuit of newer observing programs like DKIST (the big solar telescope in Hawaii) and LSST, I imagine it has become even more uncomfortable.
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I won't elaborate. A neat book just came out though : Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military https://g.co/kgs/XdRZFu
Thanks for the link. I haven't seen the book, but I know when I took a computational physics class as an undergrad (~25 years ago), there was a definite overlap between the modeling necessary to understand stellar collapse, and the modeling necessary to build better nuclear weapons.
At the conclusion of the talk, the DOE guys said appreciative things about the current work, but also pointed out that certain avenues of investigation into certain characteristics might lead to the gov't declaring this software classified, and restricting who might have access to it. My friend was at the time not a US citizen, so he would have been locked out of contributing to his own work.
"Nice piece of software you have there, would be a shame if something...happened to it..."
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looks ok to me, loading error?
i'm seeing the same, it certainly looks like the intentional blurring that google maps does for sensitive things: https://imgur.com/RqjnQTo
The shape of the blur is very strange for anything intentional. Unless the shape itself is extra intentional entropy.
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... as far as I know, mercury isn't a restricted product and can be shipped to your door. Here's a video of a guy flushing 240# of mercury down a toilet (NOT connected to a sewer or septic system), just to see if it was possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvVaaZ21C44 It's not exactly difficult to find industrial users of mercury, and the mercury at Sunspot is in a sealed instrument. I see no reason why the pres…
Why is he not wearing gloves?!
Obviously, I'd be sure of that before I handled it :)
Looks like a small sliver of the observatory is blurred on Google Maps. https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7882221,-105.8176836,349a,35...
In the late 1990s I used imagery (taken on films and later digitized) from the solar observatory at that site ("Sac Peak"). I later visited it for a conference. It's highly remote, and the handful of astronomers there lived in very basic conditions. I seem to remember a house trailer (i.e., a "manufactured home"). Note, Sac Peak is nowhere near the other solar observatory in Kitt Peak, AZ, and it is a daytime observa…
A nighttime solar observatory would have certain... observational challenges.
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Since subcosmos won't answer, I'll take a guess: Spy satellites.
Anyone can look at those though, they can't really hide them
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Other than a big telescope great for looking at things far away? I used to work in astrophysics. Telescope operators are expected not to look in certain places. Those were fun conversations. My guess is they found a spy.
I am curious as to what would happen if an organization that owned a large telescope was unwilling to cooperate with such a request.
I was raised in Alamogordo (a satellite town to HAFB and directly 'down the hill' from Sunspot) and, while I don't have any information other than what other posters have offered, I can tell you that my entire family is farrr too excited that our tiny little hometown is national news for once Edit: for clarification, HAFB and all of White Sands Missile Range sits on flatlands surrounded by two mountains; the Organ Mo…
Isn't New Mexico State U there? The Aggies?