Work starts on world's largest ground-based telescope

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Christian Science Monitor:

Technicians blasted a Chilean mountaintop to rubble Thursday to level a perch for what will be the world's largest ground-based telescope.

 

Scheduled to take its first peek at the night sky in 2024, the Extremely Large Telescope will boast a main, light-gathering mirror 39 meters across – just under half the length of a football field.

 

The telescope's size, an ability to take the twinkle out of cosmic objects, plus superb "seeing" conditions high in Chile's Atacama Desert, will give astronomers an unprecedented look at the earliest galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.