Artist Impression of ‘The European Extremely Large Telescope’ (ELT) compared to some landmarks. It will be powerful enough to find Earth-like mass exoplanets, as well as directly image larger planets and characterize their atmospheres; and also capture resolved images of distant stars & galaxies.

4 comments

1. Source with more comparisons to landmarks: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1617/

2. That name tho. Very creative

3. When the Hubble space telescope was launched, viewing stars in this quality from earth was impossible. Since then adaptive optics have been developed. A laser beam is sent out and its distortion in the atmospere observed. The inverse distortion is then applied to the telescope.

   Space based telescopes are still worthwhile because the atmosphere is not transparent for all light frequencies.

4. Chile desert, for anyone wondering… EELT and Chile went together like… like always.