Aplanatic corrector designs for the extremely large telescope.

The next century is knocking on our door, bringing with it the possibility of telescopes even bigger than the 8-10-m-class instruments that have proliferated over the past decade. The fixed spherical reflector is the most economical and pragmatic way to construct an extremely large primary mirror (30-50 m in diameter). Although spherical mirrors have virtues such as manufacturability and identically figured segments, they also create great amounts of spherical aberration and coma.

The Missing Link: Early Methane ("T") Dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

We report the discovery of three cool brown dwarfs that fall in the effective temperature gap between the latest L dwarfs currently known, with no methane absorption bands in the 1-2.5 µm range, and the previously known methane (T) dwarfs, whose spectra are dominated by methane and water. The newly discovered objects were detected as very red objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data and have JHK colors between the red L dwarfs and the blue Gl 229B-like T dwarfs.