First segments of the world's largest telescope mirror shipped to Chile The construction of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO's ELT) has reached an important milestone with the delivery to ESO and shipment to Chile of the first 18 segments of the telescope’s main mirror (M1). Once they arrive in Chile, the segments will be transported to the ELT Technical Facility, at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the country’s Atacama Desert, where they will be coated in preparation for their future installation on the telescope main structure. Unable to be physically made in one piece, M1 will consist of 798 individual segments arranged in a large hexagonal pattern, with an additional 133 being produced to facilitate the recoating of segments. Primary mirror, M1, se...
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ESO’s ground based ELT is located atop Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert The European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO’s ELT) is a revolutionary ground-based telescope that will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared light: the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Construction of this technically complex project is advancing at a good pace, with the ELT now surpassing the 50% complete milestone. This image, taken in late June 2023, shows a webcam image of the construction site of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope at Cerro Armazones, in Chile's Atacama Desert. The starry background is dominated by the core of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, and the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, two dwarf galaxies ...
Read MoreChina’s Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope is among a suite of instruments the country has built in the past three years to study the Sun On the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, engineers just finished mounting the final pieces of hardware onto the world’s largest telescope array for studying the Sun. Construction of the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT), which consists of more than 300 dish-shaped antennas forming a circle more than 3 kilometres in circumference, was completed on 13 November. Trial operations will begin in June. The 100 million yuan (US$14 million) observatory will help researchers to study solar eruptions and how they affect conditions around Earth. A huge ring of radio antennas in China will help researchers to study eruptions in the Sun’s outer atmosphere. Cred...
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