ELT is becoming a physical reality

On 8 December 2010, the ESO Council visits a small exhibition of ELT prototypes and scale models, set up at ESO Headquarters Warehouse, in Garching, near Munich, Germany. At the centre of the image, a model of one of the nearly thousand hexagonal segments which will compose the primary mirror of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world´s biggest eye on the sky. Each segment is about 1.4 metre wide and 5 cm thick. The site for the E- ELT was selected in April 2010 at Cerro Armazones, a 3046 metres high mountain in the II Region of Chile and about 20 kilometres from Cerro Paranal, home of the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). The construction of the ELT could start as early as 2011, following approval by the ESO Council.