Artist's Impression of the ELT: A Sharp Eye on the Sky

This image shows an artist's impression, based on the final design for the telescope, of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which will be the biggest ‘eye on the sky’ when it achieves first light later this decade. The telescope uses lasers to create artificial guide stars to measure how much the light is distorted by turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere. The deformable M4 mirror adjusts its shape in real time to compensate for these changes in the atmosphere, helping the ELT produce images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.