Latest Rendering of the E-ELT
A new architectural concept drawing of ESO’s planned European Extremely Large Telescope (E-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 E-ELT’s summit. The comparatively tiny pickup truck parked at the base of the E-ELT helps to give a sense of the scale of this massive telescope. The E-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 E-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 E-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.
Credit:
Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ESO
About the Image
| Id: | eely_wcar_potw |
| Type: | Photographic |
| Release date: | 28 December 2009, 09:15 |
| Size: | 5000 x 2813 px |
About the Object
| Name: | European Extremely Large Telescope |
| Type: | • Unspecified : Technology : Observatory : Telescope • Illustrations • E-ELT |
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