Mexico breaks record for most telescopes pointed at moon
Mexican hobbyists and astronomers broke their own Guinness record by using a total of 2,753 telescopes all around the country to simultaneously observe the moon, organizers of the effort reported Sunday.
In the "Reto Mexico 2011" (Mexico Challenge 2011) event, the astronomy enthusiasts at midnight Saturday managed to break the record they had set in October 2009, when they had used 1,042 telescopes to observe the moon, Raul Mujica, a member of the event's organizing committee, told EFE.
Using homemade and automatically controlled telescopes, thousands of people observed the waxing moon in its fourth quarter, the visible planets and the constellations in more than 100 cities and archaeological sites around the country.
At the archaeological zone in the town of Cholula, in the state of Puebla, organizers met to count the number of telescopes that had been set up in all of Mexico's states to make known the official results of the project.
In an open area in the central city of Puebla, simple telescopes with wooden bases and other professional ones costing up to $15,000 had been set up, said Jose Miguel Jauregui, a post-graduate student at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, or INAOE.
Jauregui said that a telescope can be built with optical materials made in Mexico at a cost of about $100.
All through the night until early Sunday morning, thousands of people came to the different sites to observe the moon through the hundreds of telescopes operated by participants.
