Dedicated SETI optical telescope launching next week

On April 11, the Planetary Society will dedicate an optical telescope at an observatory in Harvard, MA, to search for light signals from (c'mon, don't laugh) alien life. The new telescope is said to be the first ever dedicated solely to Optical SETI (OSETI) search. Snip from Planetary Society announcement:

[Its] 72-inch primary mirror is larger than any optical telescope in the U.S. east of the Mississippi river. Under the direction of Harvard University physicist Paul Horowitz and his team, The Planetary Society's new telescope will conduct a year round, all-sky survey, scanning the entire swath of our Milky Way galaxy visible in the northern hemisphere.

"This new search apparatus performs one trillion measurements per second and expands by 100,000-fold the sky coverage of our previous optical search," said Horowitz. (…)

Alien civilizations are thought by many to be at least as likely to use visible light signals for communicating as they are to use radio transmissions. Visible light can form tight beams, be incredibly intense, and its high frequencies allow it to carry enormous amounts of information. Using only Earth 2006 technology, a bright tightly focused light beam, such as a laser, can be ten thousand times as bright as its parent star for a brief instant. Such a beam could be easily observed from enormous distances.

Link to Planetary Society website, Link to OSETI project, Link to Radio SETI project.