Solar Telescopes

It’s hard to miss the research telescopes that study the night sky. Just look for a big dome with a couple of giant shutters, and there’s sure to be a telescope underneath.

But the telescopes that study the daytime sky are a little harder to pick out. Their enclosures can be far more fanciful. One looks like a modern take on an Egyptian obelisk, for example, while several look like airport control towers. There’s one in France that looks like the Jetson’s apartment building, and one on a Spanish island that looks like a Martian war machine from “War of the Worlds.”

All of these telescopes were built to watch the Sun, which presents some special problems. The main one is heat. As the ground warms up during the day, it radiates heat into the sky. These “heat waves” blur the view. So many solar telescopes are built atop tall towers — hence the odd designs. And one, in California, sits atop a lake, which stays cooler than the ground around it, so it radiates less heat.

Because they’re l