Word: reflectors
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...Mozart that, besides being musically rewarding, demonstrated that the auditorium is an acoustical gem. Heinz Hall has what is called a good throw. Its sound reaches the audience in smooth, vibrant, evenly distributed waves. German Acoustician Heinrich Keilholz removed a lot of old velvet, surrounded the stage with reflector panels (removable for opera and ballet), then hung a larger, fan-shaped reflector out over the main floor. "In the old days," says Steinberg, "Pittsburghers had no way of telling what their orchestra really sounded like. To find out, they had to go hear us play in Carnegie Hall...
...made 40 years ago by a Bell Labs scientist named Karl Jansky. In contrast, the new German instrument is a model of engineering sophistication. The entire telescope can be rotated a full 360° on a circular railroad-type track in only nine minutes. Its plate-and-mesh reflector can be tilted 90° from a point directly overhead to the horizon in only half that time. Furthermore, the telescope has been so meticulously designed that the stresses caused by such movements deform its reflector by no more than about four-hundredths of an inch, an important factor in maintaining...
...becoming an astronomical disaster area. The blinding glow from nearby Los Angeles, for example, has rendered Mount Wilson Observatory's 100-in. telescope useless for the kind of observations of distant galaxies that once made it world-renowned. Not far behind is the 120-in. Lick Observatory reflector atop Mount Hamilton, which is rapidly being swamped by the incandescence of the San Francisco Bay Area's expanding cities and towns. Even the 200-in. Hale mirror on Mount Palomar-the world's largest telescope-may be seriously imperiled before the decade's end by the increasing...
...three of the locations, scientists are literally shooting at the moon-aiming powerful beams of intense laser light at the corner reflectors left by the Apollo astronauts near their lunar landing sites. Astronomical telescopes concentrate the beams and pick up their reflection from the moon. By precisely clocking the round-trip time of each short burst of light-about 2½ seconds-scientists have been able to measure the distance between earth and moon to within six inches or less. They are gathering invaluable data on such puzzles as the drift of continents, the earth's polar wobble...
Puzzling Boulder. Scientists were equally pleased. Even before the astronauts returned, astronomers at McDonald Observatory in Texas reported that they had managed to bounce laser beams off the newly placed corner reflector at Fra Mauro; such experiments may provide valuable clues to the movements of the earth's crust and the slight wobble of the globe (see following story) as it spins on its axis. The rest of the $25 million package of experiments deployed by the astronauts also performed extremely well under unusually trying circumstances; four days after the instruments were set up in the lunar highlands, there...