Worlds Largest observatories
On a windswept mountaintop in the Chilean Andes, at the summit of Cerro Pachón, stands the Vera C. Rubin Observatory — a modern marvel of sky-watching. With its 8.4-metre primary mirror and the world’s largest astronomical digital camera, it captures the entire southern sky every few nights for a decade-long mission called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
On the barren summit of Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a silent giant is taking shape. Rising from the wind-swept plateau, the ELT’s dome glimmers in the high-altitude sunlight, a steel behemoth designed to bridge us and the cosmos. Beneath that dome lies a primary mirror spanning 39 metres—composed of nearly 800 hexagonal segments, each one polished to nanometre precision.
High on the windswept summit of Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama Desert, far above the sea and sky-glow of civilization, stands the Very Large Telescope (VLT) — one of the most advanced optical observatories on Earth. Here, four great 8.2-metre “Unit” telescopes and four smaller, mobile 1.8-metre “Auxiliary” telescopes collaborate to unlock the secrets of the cosmos.
The WM Keck Observatory is a world-class astronomical observatory located on the summit of Maunakea on the island of Hawaiʻi. It operates a pair of twin 10-meter optical and infrared telescopes, Keck I and Keck II, which are among the most scientifically productive on Earth. The observatory is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy (CARA), a collaboration between the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of California, and NASA.