Sweet mother of God, huge telescope planned

Location chosen for European Extremely Large Telescope

It will provide images 15 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8645511.stm



The observatory will be constructed on Cerro Armazones, a 3,000m-high mountain in Chile

The European Southern Observatory (Eso) organisation which is managing the project says it hopes the telescope can be operational by 2018.

The estimated cost is in the region of a billion euros.

Good news - thanks for the post. I'm a bit of a BBC website addict - and I missed that.

We're learning a lot of what we can do with ground-based telescopes - we can push the envelope in ways that we did not previously foresee.

A billion euro scope - that's a bit of money now - glad its committed.

Mark

Excellent news indeed. I first became aware of this project a few years back; originally the telescope was going to be 50 meters (the ELT 50 Project) and as far as I know research was already underway in a university (or universities) in Ireland in connection with adaptive optics and wind testing of a proposed housing structure for the giant telescope. If you’re looking at resolution capability on the original ELT 50 I think it was something like 2 milliarcsecs in the visible and 10 milliarcsecs in the near IR.

Clear skies
Mike

ei5fk wrote:

The estimated cost is in the region of a billion euros.

If we hadn't had to get nama up and running, the state here could have built over 80 of thee babies!! :ohmy:

Dave_Lillis wrote:

ei5fk wrote:

The estimated cost is in the region of a billion euros.

If we hadn't had to get nama up and running, the state here could have built over 80 of thee babies!! :ohmy:

just think though no clear skies for the next hundred years . we got to stop it .

2018 can't come quick enough, what a site for it's construction!

Keith.