Astro-image of the day: Great Telescope Canary Islands

[mckitterick]

The last SF Instituters just left, and I'm winding down by catching up on my astro-news. I found a cool story about a huge telescope going into operation. This monster, perhaps the largest optical telescope in the world at 34 FEET in diameter, is now seeing its first light. Below is a photo of the observatory on a volcanic Spanish mountaintop:

Click the image to see the story.

Note that this will soon be a teeny little thing compared to the Very Large Telescope in Chile, composed of four separate mirrors (those would be VLTs 1-4, each more than 30 FEET in diameter) that will soon work as one 650-FOOT Ginormo-Scope. Just wow.

On a related note, here's a list of the world's largest optical telescopes.

Best,
Chris

Comments

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

I wondered the same thing about the volcanic location....