A pristine lake in the cold desert region of Ladakh has been targetted by astro-physicists from Bangalore to find out if it is an apt place to set up one of the world's largest telescopes for studying the sun.
At an altitude of 14, 000 ft. areas close to Pangong lake, 160 km. from Leh, is one of the potential sites identified by Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore for its proposal to come up with Rs.150-crore National Large Solar Telescope.
Hanle in Leh where IIA already has a two- metre telescope for night sky observation and Devasthal,50 km from the picturesque Nainital are the other probable sites.
According to reliable sources, the NSLT will be a telescope of two-metre diameter.
They plan to instal the telescope by 2012. If realised, the NSLT will be one of the two major solar observation facilities coming up in India after almost half a century. The 38-cm telescope at IIA's Kodiakanal observatory was the last dedicated solar facility which came up in the 1960s.
The second new solar telescope will be a 50-cm aperture instrument for the Udaipur Solar Observatory (USO)which currently houses several smaller telescopes.
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