Rendering of the ELT

A new architectural concept drawing of ESO’s planned Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) shows the telescope at work, with its dome open and its record-setting 40-metre-class primary mirror pointed to the sky. In this illustration, clouds float over the valley overlooked by the ELT’s summit. The comparatively tiny pickup truck parked at the base of the ELT helps to give a sense of the scale of this massive telescope. The ELT dome will be similar in size to a football stadium, with a diameter at its base of over 100 m and a height of over 80 m.

Scheduled to begin operations early in the next decade, the ELT will help track down Earth-like planets around other stars in the “habitable zones” where life could exist — one of the Holy Grails of modern observational astronomy. The ELT will also make fundamental contributions to cosmology by measuring the properties of the first stars and galaxies and probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

The design for the ELT shown here was published in 2009 and is preliminary.