Biggest-Ever Telescope Approved for Construction
The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet (39 meters) wide, has been greenlit for construction atop Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced Thursday (Dec. 4).
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CrazyNeutrino said:
Biggest-Ever Telescope Approved for Construction
The world’s largest telescope has gotten its official construction go-ahead, keeping the enormous instrument on track to start observing the heavens in 2024.The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet (39 meters) wide, has been greenlit for construction atop Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced Thursday (Dec. 4).
more…
I wonder why they didn’t go for 40 metres, or 42 even.
The Rev Dodgson said:
CrazyNeutrino said:
Biggest-Ever Telescope Approved for Construction
The world’s largest telescope has gotten its official construction go-ahead, keeping the enormous instrument on track to start observing the heavens in 2024.The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet (39 meters) wide, has been greenlit for construction atop Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced Thursday (Dec. 4).
more…
I wonder why they didn’t go for 40 metres, or 42 even.
I’m guessing limitations
financial and/or technological
The Rev Dodgson said:
CrazyNeutrino said:
Biggest-Ever Telescope Approved for Construction
The world’s largest telescope has gotten its official construction go-ahead, keeping the enormous instrument on track to start observing the heavens in 2024.The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet (39 meters) wide, has been greenlit for construction atop Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced Thursday (Dec. 4).
more…
I wonder why they didn’t go for 40 metres, or 42 even.
42 would have been the most appropriate!
The ELT approved, wonderful, at 40 metre diameter.
Now we have to wait for the OWL, intended to have a single aperture of 100 meters in diameter.
The ELT will do for now.
Note that the present largest optical telescopes are much smaller than that.
The GTC is a single telescope with a diameter of 10.4 metres.
The Keck is a pair of telescopes with a diameter of 10 metres (light bucket equivalent 14.1 metres, interferometer closed in year 2012)
The VLT is a group of four telescopes at 8.2 metres each plus outliers (light bucket equivalent 16.4 metres, interferometer equivalent 138 metre diameter).
It’s as a light bucket that the ELT wins out over the VLT. The larger light gathering area means observations of faint objects six times faster than the VLT. That means that it can be used for either six times as many observations as the VLT, or it could be used to image objects six times as faint as the VLT can see.
PS. Pray for top quality adaptive optics. For ground optical and infrared telescopes these days, quality of adaptive optics is everything.