European Extremely Large Telescope Compared to the Pyramids of Giza and Rome’s Colosseum

By: | May 14th, 2015

A few months ago, I wrote an article about the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), set to become the world’s biggest telescope by far when it is completed in 2024.

I don’t think I could fathom just how massive the the European Extremely Large Telescope is going to be until I saw the images above and below comparing it to the Pyramids of Giza and the Colosseum in Rome.

The E-ELT was aptly named because it is going to be absolutely huge!

At the moment, the 100-meter high hemispherical dome of the E-ELT is under construction on the top of Cerro Armazones mountain at 3,060 meters altitude, in Chile.

To put it in perspective, the E-ELT will gather 100 million times more light than the human eye, 8 million times more than Galileo’s telescope, and 13 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing today.

And oh yeah, the images it takes will be 16 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

That’s insane!

Marshall Smith

Technology, engineering, and design enthusiast.

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