 So, it really is a pleasure to be able to come here, to stand in for the Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Professor Matthew Collis, who can't be here tonight, to tell you a little bit about what is the GMT and why it is important for Australian scientists. Now, in 10 minutes, I'm not going to be able to give you much in the way of technical detail. So if you've got any specific questions like what is the exact F ratio of the secondary or how much does the Gregorian instrument rotate away, you'll have to save those to the end so I can answer them. But in the meantime, what I'll try to do is just give you a general picture. Now, what is the GMT? The GMT is one of a generation of new telescopes that represent the next step in the size of optical facility that astronomers have available to them. Not unimaginatively, as a class, they are known as the extremely large telescopes. This distinguishes them from the very large telescopes that we currently have. But the important point to note is that bigger and bigger telescopes have been a history of astronomy for about the last 400 years. And the reason for that is two fairly straightforward things. The first is that a bigger telescope with a larger mirror catches more light in much the same way that a larger bucket catches more rain. So if you want to look for extremely faint objects, you need a very large telescope. And the second point is that bigger telescopes produce sharper images. And so I can see finer detail on the universe and see smaller things nearby or, alternatively, things that are somewhat larger much further away. Australia's largest telescope at the moment is the four-meter Anglo-Australian telescope, which sits just outside Cunabara brand on Siding Spring Observatory. And it is nowadays a middle-sized telescope. The largest telescopes in the world are the Keck telescopes in Hawaii with mirrors that are 10 meters in diameter. So the mirror diameter is about the width of this room in highly precise glass. Now, by comparison, many of you will know about the Hubble Space Telescope and the exquisite images it produces because it's in space. Hubble is quite a small telescope nowadays. It's only a 2.5-meter telescope in size. And sort of because I'm a scientist, I have to produce plots of dots to show you this sort of progression in the size of telescopes from way back in 1600 when Galileo put together the first refracting telescopes. There's been quite an orderly progression from soon after that, almost a sort of a straight line on a logarithmic plot here, from Herschel's large reflecting telescope at the beginning of the 19th century through to the 100-inch Hooker telescope in California on Mount Wilson to the 200-inch 5-meter Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory, where I was privileged to be able to do some work as a graduate student, through to the largest telescope we've got at the moment, Kepp. There are two of those on Mauna Kaia, the mountain of Mauna Kaia in Hawaii. GMT is the next big step. And how big a step is it? It's an extremely large step indeed. So the background here shows you a sort of a color diagram of the mosaic of mirrors, seven 8.4-meter diameter mirrors, which will collect their light together to give you the equivalent in terms of collecting area of a single mirror that's 22 meters in diameter. So that's almost three times larger, well, just over twice larger the size of the Kepp telescopes, almost three times larger than the 8-meter class telescopes that are around at the moment. And in particular, it has a size for when it's diffraction limited, when the optics are tuned up so that this telescope is producing the ultimate resolution images it can, equivalent to a 24.5-meter telescope. And that magic second step happens because up at the top end of the telescope, off the top of this image, you'll see lots of images of this telescope and somebody will point one out a little bit late off. The top of these images are seven adaptive secondary mirrors that are each matched to one of these primary mirrors that can basically vibrate and wobble in order to take out the distortions induced by the earth's atmosphere and produce a diffraction limited image. It's essentially an optical telescope, an optical or infrared telescope, so it counts photons and it will work from 0.3 of a micron or 300 nanometers or 3,000 angstroms all the way up to five micron wavelengths in the infrared. And the total cost of the facility will be around, well, it has been defined that it will be 1.05 billion US dollars and those are as spent dollars, so including inflation through to the end of the project. The exciting thing for Australia is that we are a 10% partner in this project. This is going to be right at the forefront of international facilities when it comes online and it will see Australian astronomers collaborating with some of the most preeminent institutions in the world. Now you've all seen the movie that was cycling through just before we started, but I think it's worthwhile to give you an idea of the scale of this project. This is the enclosure and that's the telescope. There's the focus where the secondary mirrors are actually held to send light back through the hole in the primary mirror here to the instruments. That is the tractor trailer of a semi-trailer. That's a tiny little thing down there. So this is going to be one ginormous structure. I actually did the calculation, the area that's been cleared on the top of this mountain to put the telescope on is large enough to put the MCG on. The partnership that we're going to be involved with really does involve some of the leading astronomical institutions in the world. The Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, which was involved in the construction and use of the Hale 200-inch telescope. For many years, the largest telescope in the world. University of Arizona, University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, University of Chicago, where of course Fermi did a lot of nuclear work back just before the war. Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Harvard. So these are really big name institutions around the globe. Also the Kazi, the Koreans are involved. And here in Australia, there are essentially two partners involved. The ANU, who is a 5% partner. And Astronomy Australia Limited, representing the rest of the astronomical institutions in Australia, who is also a 5% partner. The telescope itself will be installed at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. And Brazil, the state of São Paulo in Brazil is also a partner. So this is the place where the telescope goes. It's a Southern Hemisphere facility, on one of the very best observing sites in the world. So why are we doing all this? Of course, there's no point just building a giant telescope in order to have a bigger telescope than everybody else. That would be a frightful waste of a billion dollars. We're building this because it will enable the next generation of astronomers to be working at the absolute forefront of the field. So the exquisite imaging that GMT will produce will probe the dark matter structure in and within nearby galaxies to our own and do so at a much greater distance. So we'll be able to look at the detailed structure of the dark matter in a much larger range of galaxies than we can with telescopes at the moment. The enormous aperture will enable us to detect the first light coming from the very first stars and galaxies back in the early days of the universe. And the ability of this telescope to be a general purpose telescope with a wide suite of instruments that you'll hear a little bit more about as we go on this evening, will allow astronomers to explore the detailed histories of how stars form in these galaxies and how galaxies are built up and evolve over the history of the universe. And from my point of view, the exciting part of this telescope that I want to be able to use, hopefully just shortly before I retire, is going to be that the GMT's huge collecting area allows us to do searches for and studies of planets around nearby stars that are not simply not possible at the moment. The research we do in finding planets around other stars is essentially limited by how many photons we can get from all of those stars because we have to use very precise techniques to see the impact the planet has on the star. We don't actually see the planets themselves. And so that takes lots and lots and lots of photons and being able to do that with an enormously larger telescope with the exquisite quality of instrumentation that GMT is going to have is going to be groundbreaking for that field. In particular, this science is science that the GMT will do first before any of the other generation of extremely large telescopes. So it's going to be an extremely exciting time to be working on exoplanets over the next decade with this instrument. So at that point, I will stop. So that's the general background. That's why we want to build the next generation of enormously larger telescope. And the exciting thing I think is that the fact that this is a telescope that really will enable Australian astronomers here at ANU and everywhere else around the nation to be competing, to be collaborating with leading astronomers around the globe in undertaking the forefront astronomy of the next generation. Thank you. Thank you.