The Extremely Large Telescope: The World's Biggest Eye On The Sky. ELT HOME; ABOUT. About the ELT Timeline Location Webcams Facts Road to the ELT Meet the Team Working Groups Industrial and Institutional Partners FAQ. TELESCOPE. Telescope Overview Dome Main Structure. Mirrors.

The giant ELT dome will house the telescope and its interior structure, providing protection from the extreme environment of Chile’s Atacama Desert. The main structure of the telescope will hold its five mirrors and optics, including the enormous 39-metre primary mirror.

ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT for short, is a revolutionary ground-based telescope that will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest visible and infrared light telescope in the world: the world’s biggest eye on the sky.

Jan 30, 2025 · This interactive, 360-degree webcam offers high-resolution internal views from the top of the dome of ESO’s ELT as it is being constructed. From this perspective the construction of the telescope pier and mechanical structure can be observed.

Jan 24, 2025 · This mirror will stabilise the images of the Extremely Large Telescope | ELT Updates

Too large to be made from a single piece of glass, the 39-metre-diameter mirror will consist of 798 segments, each about 5 centimetres thick, measuring close to 1.5 metres across and weighing 250 kg, including its support.

Cerro Armazones is a mountain at an altitude of 3060 metres in the central part of Chile’s Atacama Desert, some 130 kilometres south of the town of Antofagasta and about 23 kilometres from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) Main mirror diameter. 39 metres. Light collecting area. 978 square metres. Number of main mirror segments. 798. Alignment precision of the different segments that make up the main mirror. Tens of nanometres (10000 thinner than a human hair) across its entire 39-metre diameter ...

The unprecedented light-gathering power of a 40-metre-class telescope and the implementation of extreme adaptive optics in the ELT are crucial to reaching this limit.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will have a 39-metre mirror (almost half the length of a football pitch) and will thus be by far the biggest telescope in the world to observe in the visible and the near-infrared (there are larger radio telescopes).