17 Tonnes Of Spinning Glass: Making The World's Largest Telescope




The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is an astronomical observatory and the world's largest optical/near-infrared extremely large telescope now under construction. Part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) agency, it is located on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The design consists of a reflecting telescope with a 39.3 metre diameter (126 foot) segmented primary mirror and a 4.2 metre diameter secondary mirror, and will be supported by adaptive optics, eight laser guide star units and multiple large science instruments.The observatory aims to gather 100 million times more light than the human eye, 13 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing in 2014, and be able to correct for atmospheric distortion. It has around 256 times the light gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope and, according to the ELT's specifications, would provide images 16 times sharper than those from Hubble.


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