Hi Marcia

I know what you mean. I always thought we'd only spot them through optical interferometers built on the Moon, but adaptive optics makes humungous scopes here on Earth a live option without the need for all the hassle of getting to the Moon.

Ever read much SF? Brian N. Ball edited a few anthologies and wrote a few stories in the 1960s. My favourite story from his corpus was anthologised in "Tales of Science Fiction" - set in 2031 a young wannabe astronomer has blitzed his degree and has applied for the Lunar Observatory - the place for all professional optical astronomy. He's turned down because of his medical - he has a bad heart valve and the Observatory won't risk him dying en route to the Moon due to all the gees.

Naturally the story has a happy ending, but I won't spoil it - let's say he finds an unexpected way of getting there alive. The key attraction of the Observatory was a 1,000" scope - as it was in Arthur Clarke's "Earthlight".

Now it seems we might end up with a 100 metre scope here on Earth - if the European OWL telescope gets funded, as seems likely. And 1,000" scopes are currently under construction, or at least development.

Adam

BTW the Lunar Shuttle from the Ball story uses a net trick to get to the Moon - developed by research using Dyna-Soar (which dates the story to pre-1965.) Basically the Shuttle uses dynamic soaring to boost to escape speeds by riding waves in the outer atmosphere. Shame Dyna-Soar never flew to show us the way...