Our understanding of the universe depends on how good our telescopes are.
Two of the most powerful sit on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
One of the telescopes has a camera so sensitive, it could detect a single candle flame on the surface of the moon.
Together they make up the Keck Observatory— the world's largest optical observatory.
Tech Insider got to take a tour of the Keck telescope headquarters in Waimea, Hawaii with communication officer Steve Jefferson.
Keep scrolling to see how this powerful pair of telescopes work, and how they revolutionized the field of astronomy.
The twin Keck telescopes sit on the summit of Mauna Kea. They first came online in the 1990s, and they've been churning out incredible revelations about the universe ever since.
The secret to their amazing success lies in Keck's revolutionary mirror design. A telescope can only gather as much light as the size of its mirror will allow — so Keck's mirrors are enormous.
It's actually structurally impossible to build a mirror larger than about eight meters long though. So engineers built Keck's 10-meter mirrors using smaller hexagon-shaped segments that fit together. Here's a model of what one of the mirrors look like:
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