This simple animation shows you just how immense the European Extremely Large Telescope is going to be compared to the Pyramids of Giza, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Statue of Liberty. It’s going to be Extremely Large.
The 100-meter high hemispherical dome of the E-ELT is under construction on the top of Cerro Armazones mountain at 3,060 meters altitude, in the Sierra Vicuña Mackenna of the Chilean Coast Range. According to the European Southern Observatory, this revolutionary new ground-based telescope is going to be ‘Earth’s biggest eye on the sky’: it will have a 39-meter main mirror and will gather 13 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing today. Moreover, the E-ELT will gather 100 million times more light than the human eye, 8 million times more than Galileo’s telescope, and 26 times more than a single Very Large Telescope Unit. The E-ELT will gather more light than all of the existing 8–10-metre class telescopes on the planet combined.
The E-ELT will be able to correct for the atmospheric distortions, providing images 16 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope, thus allowing detailed studies of planets around other stars, super-massive black holes, and the dark matter and dark energy which dominate the Universe. The E-ELT program was approved in 2012 and the construction was started at the end of 2014. As an integrated part of the Paranal Observatory, first E-ELT light is targeted for 2024. [The European Extremely Large Telescope/ESO]
dragon wrote:Just wait till we build a E-ELT on the dark side of the moon
That actually would be great. Having telescopes (both optical and radio) in the shadow of the Moon will give us unmatched clarity when collecting data.
The takeaway I get from this is how amazing it is that some of the largest structures ever built by mankind were constructed around 2300 BC. Of course... they're basically just huge mounds with no internal structure, but still.
dragon wrote:Just wait till we build a E-ELT on the dark side of the moon
That actually would be great. Having telescopes (both optical and radio) in the shadow of the Moon will give us unmatched clarity when collecting data.
Not only that, think of the baseline distance you'd get for interferometry. Existing telescope arrays hundreds of yards across, or dozens of miles across, are impressive enough now. This would be mindboggling.
“Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel — merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”
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dragon wrote:Just wait till we build a E-ELT on the dark side of the moon
That actually would be great. Having telescopes (both optical and radio) in the shadow of the Moon will give us unmatched clarity when collecting data.
Not only that, think of the baseline distance you'd get for interferometry. Existing telescope arrays hundreds of yards across, or dozens of miles across, are impressive enough now. This would be mindboggling.
Nah if you want a baseline that would make radio and SETI astronomers cream themselves, just bring up the idea of a series of radio telescopes in trojan orbits with the Earth at regular intervals. Imagine what you could pick up with a virtual telescope 2 AU in diameter...
At that point it'd probably be more then worth it to put the systems out past the asteroid belt, even if it meant using a couple fewer telescopes. The belt isn't very dense, but its enough to create interference, and the delta vee increase needed isn't going to be that much over a closer solar orbit. Keep in mind we already do exploit the movement of the earth and stuff in earth orbit to create virtual telescopes, but of course you have to wait six months to get the second half of the data. This is very useful for range finding on distant stars.
We need to perfect a couple pieces of enabling technology before we could even start serious design work on a true 2 AU system though. Laser communications to handle the bandwidth, and a much more precise navigational system in ordered to align the interferometry at the least. I'm not sure if even that NASA project for quasar based GPS style navigation would be accurate enough. Alignment errors are a big factor in why we still want to build single large telescopes, and tightly clustered ground based arrays, rather then just spamming smaller ones all over the planet. One or two planet scale radio arrays do already exist though.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
