ESOCast 16: E-ELT Site Chosen

On 26 April 2010, the ESO Council selected Cerro Armazones as the site for the planned 42-metre European Extremely Large Telescope. Cerro Armazones is an isolated mountain at 3060 metres altitude in the central part of Chile's Atacama Desert, some 130 kilometres south of the town of Antofagasta and about 20 kilometres away from Cerro Paranal, home of ESOs Very Large Telescope.

Credit:

ESO. Visual design and editing: Martin Kornmesser and Luis Calçada. Cinematography: Peter Rixner. Editing: Herbert Zodet. Web and technical support: Lars Holm Nielsen and Raquel Yumi Shida. Written by: Henri Boffin, Herbert Zodet and Eric Hal Schwartz. Host: Dr. J. Narration: Gaitee Hussain. Music: Movetwo. Footage and photos: ESO, Stéphane Guisard. Directed by: Herbert Zodet. Executive producer: Lars Lindberg Christensen.

For more information visit http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1018a/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• eso
• eelt
• european southern observatory
• dr j

[sbergman27]

@oscarlithgow I don't think so. I think that has to be done in the infrared, which doesn't work so well from Earth. NASA has the space-based Spitzer, but its mirror is only 0.85m. ESA has their new Herschel Space Observatory, with a 3.5m mirror, which I think may be the best available today for this sort of thing. The next big thing for studying exoplanetary atmospheres would be the James Webb Space Telescope, a space-based 6.5m infrared telescope scheduled for launch in about 2015.

[oscarlithgow]

OMG that's large !!! Will it have the capacity to study the recently discovered exoplanets atmosphere chemistry ?