Flying high above the ELT

This video shows a panoramic view of the construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Placed on the picturesque Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the ELT will be about 20 kilometres away from Cerro Paranal, where ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) resides. The steel structure of the dome in this video is computer-generated and has been overlaid on actual drone footage of the construction site (taken in November 2022), but the real thing is already standing on Cerro Armazones – you can watch a timelapse of the construction here. Once the structure of the ELT’s dome is complete, it will house five impressive mirrors, including the world’s largest primary mirror ever made for an optical telescope.