this nerd agrees :)

Same here.

you're not alone buddy, I'd love to be up there also.

I would find it fascinating to use as a sniper perch with a Intervention and a few dozen crates of ammunition

@@Shinzon23 lol

st0rmforce when britain has more money to spare ;)

+ThaTyger So never then?

Shortly after they build the Latest Gargantuan Big Telescope.

All of these fit inside the Massive Astronomically Gigantic Observatory

OWL, not BLT. It will be the overwhelmingly large telescope. there were already plans to build it but it was downsized due to costs and renamed ELT.

Can’t wait for SMALL telescope

My Skywatcher 127 mak would be an ant compared to the Extremely Large Telescope LOL.

Well played.

The ELT is under construction and it may be done in 2027. Just noted your comment was nine years ago.

I look forward to the _Oppressively Colossal Telescope_ and the _Cataclysmic Telescope_. And then, one day, astronomers will build an unspeakable _device_ which will be simply named: _The Final Telescope_ (xkcd.com/1294/)

LOL this made my day :D

not sure about that lol

I was thinking the same xDDD

super duper telescope

Yeah, they could have just called it the BFT.

michael benzur It would be funny, but won't happen...

Unfortunately the atmospheric conditions in South Asia is quite bad for Telescopes - I am not sure but China or Mongolia should have nice locations.

With monsoons and typhoons, it is quite complicated to have a clear and clean sky, in that part of Asia. That factor is very important, to locate the astronomical observatories. The north of Chile has a very favorable climate for the study of space ...

Im from Chile and trust me, it is, you can see the whole nebula on any given night, it's pretty amazing.

I watched a documentary about that desert and they said some places in it haven't seen rain for billions of years. What an amazing place!

+Shawn Thompson Billions of years? Very unlikely.

+Shawn Thompson wouldn't be billions... but it has been at least a few centuries. =)

HE is just bulllshiting.

We need a Bloody Large Telescope :D

Yeah... Europeans really like to name things with acronyms. You have to see how social, employment or infrastructure projects are sometimes called. :-)

Proteins Dreaming Codons year like americans don't like to use acromnyms ;)

I can hear the tinfoil people already claiming Marsfraud.

+Peter Hall It has to be the Ludicrously Large Telescope to honor Mel Brooks.

THE END.

The MTBTYT, what a masterpiece.

Narrator from the future: "Brazil would not, in fact, join ESO. But the ELT was built nonetheless."

@@AGH331 I really appreciate this reply :) Thanks for the update from the future and let me just say that I can't wait until 2025 for first observations :)

Man... Every day I wake up, and Im Brazilian. How the do you not sign the contract to be part of a project like this. Seriously, the admission fee is smaller then most of the world cup stadiums.

Watch the Hubble Space Telescope video, it's on DeepSkyVideos somewhere. It answers your question ( I had the same one!) Basicly space telescopes cannot have very large mirrors so there field of view is quite narrow. They are great at zooming in to stars etc. to make detail images. But not very good at greating wide angle images. I bet a new Hubble telescope would be quite useful. A lot of progress had been made in creating better sensors in the last decade.

Sort of, kinda. For optical astronomy with a ground-based system that uses active optics, the atmosphere isn't much of a problem, that's what active optics are for. Space telescopes are also incredibly expensive to build, launch, and maintain compared to a comparable ground-based system. That's why we're not launching an optical telescope into orbit, the James Webb is infrared.

I think even though there is a clear downside to not have the telescope in orbit you can go much bigger on earth nullifiying that handicap and probably for maintenance reasons. Just guessing though.

$$$ is the answer

We simply are not capable of building a telescope with a diameter of 20+ meters in space. If we could figure out how to do it (we just migth be able to) it would probably cost more than a hundred billion dollars.

Hahahahahahaha

Don't think too hard mate you could hurt yourself

No. The truss structure sets the limit

Oh! goody a 10 billion dollar picture, why not take two, that would not be to much more.

Northern Chile is basically a Mars preview, there's even a "Valley of the Moon"

A meter is 39 inches figure it out.

+Darrell Grisham 42 is a meme. It's a reference to Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy novels.

Alan Baca they're pretty much across the earthquake issues

+Alan Baca Lets hope the changes in weather due to Climate Change does not change the arrid region before its built.

Mirrors are protected by giant airbags and the structure itself is also protected against earthquakes.

Don't worry, it's Chile, everything is earthquake proof since decades

brazil should invest money in their people lifes, because brazilians a lot of them lives in poor conditions :/ im amazed how government found that much money to donate.

RoxyDzey,don't talk about things you don't understand.

If depends of Brazil this telescope will never finish to be build,Brazilian government it's too corrupt to care about science,(don't expect less for a country that doesn't care for science,and find it unimportant,this is the why isn't a developed country ),the president didn't sign the decree since been approved by the senate in 2015,thanks to corruptions scandals the delay the country. I suggest ESO looking for some other Partner a serious one and not Brazil.

I suggest that these outrageous amounts of the peoples money should go for the peoples benefit, not a few people who spend most of their time on their back sides in an office. These telescopes cost more than many countries health care systems cost. But, then again people are cheap, wars prove that.

Technically it would be possible to make interferometry with VLT and EELT together, but it's not planned for the time being.

Not really, the VLT is already set up so it can be used as an interferometer (which allows it to be used a bit like one large telescope). However while interferometry is relatively common place with radio telescopes it is much, much more difficult in the optical region. In addition the light needs to be manipulated with very low tolerances, tolerances that are very difficult to achieve on close located purpose built observatories and really not feasible in other situations. In addition while the maximum resolution (the ability to distinguish two close by objects) is increased with aperture synthesis, the is still the problem of gathering enough light for the faint objects to be detected. Maybe (hopefully) the technical difficulties will be reduced in the near future and we'll see multiple large optical interferometers.

A) the ELT will already have an mirror area more than five times that of all four of the VLT scopes combined. So not much to be gained there. Btw. for higher resolution the VLTs are combined optically to interfere through mirrors in the ground. I doubt this could be done over the distance to another mountain. B) At the distances of objects in space we are talking about, "stereoscopic" vision is of no use. Compare it to the eyes: beyond 5, maybe 10 meters almost all the depth perception is done by knowledge how big things should be and other hints like occlusion. At these distances one eye is as good as two. Rough estimate: 10 cm of eye distance gets you 10 m of stereoscopic vision. So 10km of telescope distance will get you 1000km of stereoscopic vision. You could argue the sensors are way more accurate, so times it by 1000. Still just 1 million km of "stereovision". Another example: the stellar parallax uses the orbit of the Earth for "stereovision", with half a year between the images. This method is still only good for measurements of a few thousand lightyears with the newest satelites.

Who knew noface was an astronomy buff.