Gaia Satellite Will Take Five Months to Focus

The recently launched European telescope Gaia has just begun to focus its telescope, and will take up to five months to complete this before it can become fully operational.  Gaia is a telescope designed to survey the Milky Way using spectrophotometry and parallax measurements, it orbits the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system.  As mentioned in lecture Gaia's instruments are significantly more precise than previous apertures so the data we get from this should be really useful.  Unfortunately the article mentions that it takes up to 3 years to process the data back and 5 years to collect... so we will have to wait until 2022 to get all the data!  While this is disappointing, I think it's great that Gaia will be able to collect data from up to a billion stars, as well as possible exoplanets that orbit those stars.  Maybe soon we can have those cool star wars holographic planetary maps.

Here's a pretty picture Gaia took.

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