Artist’s impression of the ELT

Artist's impression of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in its enclosure on Cerro Armazones, a 3046-metre mountaintop in Chile's Atacama Desert. The 39-metre ELT will be the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world — the world's biggest eye on the sky. Operations are planned to start early in the next decade, and the ELT will tackle some of the biggest scientific challenges of our time.

The design for the ELT shown here is preliminary.