Awesome, I love the fog. I love to sit at the beach and watch it roll in off the ocean and envelope everything. Eerie but beautiful.

Foggy indeed Carol ... there's a lot of that about at the moment.   :)

Here's the web page ... http://www.sao.arizona.edu/FLWO/whipple.html

Wow, foggy up here today!

you'v heard of ghost hunters...we are UFO hunters...LOL

LOL!  You and I seem particularly good at spotting them!  :D

sorry MD...just assumed it was a givin...we all know about them...LOL

Trix..... you forgot to mention UFOs!  LOL

they are telescopes looking for other planets and galaxies...

this....sorry...had a stutter there

tthis is so cool...telescopes are open now....but i got me eyes opened looking for aliens

hi md, if you are still here the boxes are open now, it is 6:43 in Arizona right now.

Thanks Janet. When I figure out what time that is in England, I'll have a look! Lol.

 Sorry, I should have said that ia Arizona time.

Hi MD, no need to go through the animations. If you tune in between 5:30 and 6:40 pm, you can see all the boxes open up and the lenses  come out.

If you look at "Animation of Last Snapshots,"  at some point the box on the left is open.

Hi Cathartic Angel. I've read your comment several times and I'm finally convinced you're right.

Plus, I Googled it!  :))

Okay I'm gonna take a stab at this. The thingy in the upper left hand corner of the image is HATnet which you can google and see a home page for this project. HAT is Hungarian Automated Telescope and this is a group of six of them that are part of a project to detect planets around other stars.

The basic strategy is to take pictures that include lots of stars and repeat observations in the same patch  of sky and measure the apparent brightness of each star many times. Over time, some of them will get brighter and fainter in a regular way. There are two main reasons that can be happening. 1) the star has some kind of internal physics that makes its energy output (and hence brightness) go up and down in a regular way. This actually does happen and how fast it goes up and down can tell us some interesting things about those stars. OR... 2) The star could have a planetary system that we just happen to be viewing edge on (like looking at a plate edge on). When large planets pass in front of the star, they create a mini-eclipse. Just a tiny bit of the light is blocked and if you take a picture during that time, the overall light from the star will be a little less. Since the planet goes around and around the star, these mini-eclipses happen at regular intervals and so recording them can tell you that there's a planet there and something about relative sizes of the planet and the star it's going around.

Cant see a laser, so have no idea if this or not, maybe a compensating setup thats benign in finction, I never messed with this aspect before, so dont know

MD I waited til now to animate the last shots, it is some sort of compensating viewers, small telescopes, I'm guessing here, these might be part of a laser setup to compensate for atmospheric aberration, not sure, hopefully someone will come in that knows for sure. I'm so sorry, could not do this before, as when you told me, i couldn't, and later could not find the bugger hahahahaha Its optics, cant tell what type, but assuredly optics, set a distance from the primary Scope (Dome)  fascinating

MD, these seem to be some sort of extension of what ever they are using for observation, as i see nothing familiar in monitoring equipment hmmmmm perhaps seismograph  ????? ok, aliens works hahahahah