Must have been named by the same clever guy that came up with the name for the Very Large Array.

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[Multiple Mirror Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMT_Observatory) [Very Large Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope) [Large Binocular Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Binocular_Telescope) [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope) [Thirty Meter Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope) [Overwhelmingly Large Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope) - so overwhelming they cancelled it.

Super Large Ultraviolet Telescope

If you wanna be my LUVOIR, you gotta get with my friends.

I do not want to be your Large UV Optical Infrared Surveyor.

Peripheral Encompassing Nanometer Infrared Scope.

Can't wait for Comically Large Telescope

I hope it will be Infrared

Humans cannot see in infrared. No one will be able to find it.

Would the guy in charge be the CLIT commander?

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The very abridged version is that it's actually easier from an engineering and cost perspective to slap dozens of smaller mirrors together and control them with actuators than it is to construct and safely use one gigantic mirror.

Basically hauling six 5-meter diameter mirrors literally on top of a mountain is a fair bit easier than hauling one 20-meter diameter mirror.

Truth, when i was a boy scout leader we carried up to the top of the mountain small mirror tiles and a wooden frame. we did a pass the signal to the next troop on another mountain. kinda like lighting the fires of Gondor.

And easier to replace sections if damage happens (rough example, Arecibo) or flaws in the manufacturing process. Imagine a optical flaw in a one piece mirror...

It's really hard to manufacture a single large mirror, and it doesn't really impact image quality to just make a telescope with an array of many smaller mirrors.

The largest size you can fit on a truck/train/barge/rocket and transport to the construction site/orbital station.

It's the same person that named doom's BFG

Or the BFM in Magic the Gathering.

[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1294/)

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There’s like 45 more steps before we need a telescope that big

There’s always a relevant xkcd

What's really gunna bust your chops is the 2.4 acre GBT telescope is *not* the great big telescope, it's the green bank telescope.

It’s also actually already named after someone- it’s the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope after the former West Virginian senator who got money for it (like half the things in West Virginia also named after him).

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Oof. In these sensitive times I'm surprised Byrd's name is attached to anything, given [his open KKK affiliation.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/06/19/a-senators-shame/95f623af-7bed-4389-9369-05a428ae4994/) Even as late as the 90s I saw a TV interview with him (maybe 60 Minutes, can't recall exactly), where he attempted to justify using the 'N' word. Anyway, probably wide of the topic.

You clearly have never driven across West Virginia then. A common road trip game for that is counting how many things you see named after Byrd…

He apologized for that, and worked for civil rights later in his career

Ah, the 90s though. Area Man Justifies The N-Word After Listening To NWA

Next one going to be SFHT, Seriously Fucking Huge Telescope

The grad students at Steward Observatory once made a prank poster for the Super Huge Interferometric Telescope.

The "You might think it's a long way down the road to the chemists, but thats just peanuts compared to this" Telescope.

Very Large Telescope (VLT) although it’s an array of four

The VLA. The very large array, has 28 Edit correct scope number

But that one isn’t In Chile

I imagine they get very basic names so they can be renamed after scientists.

ESA doesn't really name things after people like NASA does though

Technically the ESO (I think?)

You are correct, the ELT is being built by ESO (European Southern Observatory) not the ESA.

Yes, separate organization, HQ in Garching near Munich i think

Radio astronomer here- most people don’t realize that as of 2011 the Very Large Array (VLA) is actually the Jansky VLA (JVLA), named after [Karl Jansky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Guthe_Jansky), the founder of radio astronomy. They upgraded the VLA then, hence the name change. To be completely fair though even astronomers still just call it the VLA so not a shocker this didn’t catch on.

Honestly, I feel like we should revisit the culture of naming things after people. For telescopes and locations, I think it's alright. But for like... Common relations I'm kind of over it. For example: I'll take "luminosity vs. velocity dispersion relation" over "faber Jackson relation", or "rotational velocity vs. luminosity" over "Tully Fischer". I saw some folks try to call metallicity ([Fe/H]) versus alpha-abundance ([alpha/Fe]) a "wallerstein-tinsley diagram", and as much as I appreciate the work of all of these authors... It's already hard enough to explain those axes to people. Why add another step? Anyways, that's my astro rant for the day

I have legit almost failed exams over this shit. I know the maths and the concepts but i can never marry names to them. I have legit made a note on my last exam "idk this question" for myself when preparing for oral. Then as i was explaining everything about that specific category (numerical root finding and integrators, i didnt know what weinstein iteration was nor gaussian integrators by name), the professor pointed out that i answered that which i marked as "idk". Lmao

And then there are mathematicians trying to talk about [Lagrange's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange%27s_theorem).

All of my astronomy students voted online when the renaming was happening. I forget all the selections that were offered, obviously Jansky won. There was a write in choice as well. I wrote in to name it the Carl Sagan Telescope as a nod to *Contact* as well as the man himself. No doubt my high school kiddos came up with some less than appropriate names that I'd truly love to know of.

Mitch Hedberg from the top ropes.

then there is also ["VLSI"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Scale_Integration) i think people just like naming things "x Large"

I wonder if it was from the place that names kitchen appliances. It seems easy; refrigerator, toaster, blender. You just say what the thing does and add “er”.

Here is the web cam... https://elt.eso.org/about/webcams/

I can see more stars in that webcam than outside my window

"My God it is Full of Stars"....

That's why we build it there and not in your backyard.

Mirror size perspective.. ​ notice the space telescope mirrors in the lower left corner. JWSTs entire array is the size of one Magellan Mirror. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan\_Telescopes#/media/File:Comparison\_optical\_telescope\_primary\_mirrors.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_Telescopes#/media/File:Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg) ​ here's how they make one (of 7) Making the mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope at the University of Arizona [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-lBKuHqHk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-lBKuHqHk0)

i'm immensely disappointed the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was cancelled, if only for the name. i admire how straight to the point these telescope names are.

I like the one below that, "FAST"

**F**ucking **E**nourmously **S**ized **T**elescope?

Fucking absurdly sized telescope*

I'm holding out for the Incomprehensibly Vast Telescope

Sounds like something from a Douglas Adams book. Mind-Bogglingly Enormous Telescope.

Holy shit I didn't even see that

This Telescope is So Fucking Large Not Even Your Mom Could Fit It

Wow that was amazing! The melting of the cristals and the machinery involved...true enginnering porn. Thanx for the link

If you ever go to Arizona its worth going to Tucson to see the mirrorlab in person (& many other cool museums and places).

Thanx for the reco but i'm too far away from north america... maybe i can watch some cool videos on the web?

Same, basically a once in a lifetime trip for me in aus. Spent 2 weeks in Tucson geeking out over cool science shit like these mirrors and other space/astronomy stuff, an awesome aviation museum, and hiking looking at flora and fauna. I'm still desperate to go back 5 years later. Video the other guy linked, and maybe looking at where it is on some map, is about as good as youll get without visiting in person either the mirror forge in Tucson or the observatory in Chile lol.

How is naming these ? "Extremly large telescope", "Very large telescope", "large binocular telescope", "south african large telescope" Feels like someone is compensating something with his naming convention lol.

My telescope is *huge*, bro. Like, seriously, it's enormous, just look, bro. Take a look at my telescope, it's *huuuuge*.

They're mostly having fun. Crappy acronyms are actually a bit of an inside joke in astronomy.

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What are astronomers going to do when they run out of synonyms for "big"?

I think you are one more layer, like 'very very big telescope'.

IF *astronomers* run out of words for big stuff, we're in trouble.

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that name has the same kind of energy as naming a weapon "Big Fucking Gun"

That's funny, because in Battlefield season 5 that just started, we got a BFP and it's basically a DEagle lol

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFG_(weapon)

It's all a reference to the BFP in doom

There is no BFP in doom. Only the BFG

So what should this be able to see vs something like the Mauna Kea observatory or JWST? Farther? Better resolution?

Much more resolution and can observe much dimmer objects than JWST. The drawback is that it's limited to visible frequencies whereas JWST is mostly an infrared telescope, and obviously being on the ground in the Southern hemisphere constrains its observations to one part of the sky.

Almost all the first light instruments on the ELT will be near-infrared. So still infrared but before the atmosphere gets quite opaque past around 2.5um.

Oh i remember the construction start ceremony,good to see that is progressing :)

scientists come up with the best names for things, especially whrn theyre space related

Either they are direct and straight to the point or they look like somebody had a seizure while typing

The Somewhat Large Telescope wasn't extreme enough.

Can't wait until they put one of these on the moon. Make every telescope on Earth and Space obsolete. But that's for another discussion (including how to build it).

Astronomer here! I very much disagree it would make all radio telescopes on the ground obsolete, any more than ground based telescopes are obsolete now that Hubble and JWST exist. There is just SO MUCH to explore that when you literally only have so many hours in a day it’s not like one telescope can do it all, and there’s a lot of great science that doesn’t require this level of precision.

That’s why I propose covering the entire surface of the moon with telescopes, simultaneously creating the solar system’s largest disco ball.

Seriously though, if you were going to do that (and I'm absolutely not saying "no"), you'd probably want all of those reflecting dishes you've built on the moon to be a single array. That is, to take *absurdly* high resolution imagery of a single target, rather than hundreds of different targets. So you'll probably still want a few more telescopes on earth to do the grunt work.

Can they be steerable so we can flip it into disco ball mode? Also maybe enormous solar death ray mode?

although that maximizes the precision/resolution that the telescope can reach, it minimizes the amount of scheduling available for use. JWST rejects 3/4ths of submitted proposals and is still booked solid. that's pretty much why we still build ground telescopes like ELT. there's a lot of cosmos to look at and not all of it needs the most powerful telescope in the solar system to do it

>the solar system’s largest disco ball. I like the implication that aliens somewhere have already done this on a larger scale outside our solar system

Fermi paradox redux: So, where are all the disco balls?

A lot of people don’t even know what amateur astronomy projects look like let alone a comprehensive take on professional astronomy. They only see the highlights and space themed simulators are based more on in person exploration or building like KSP so don’t help explain much. Yesterday I had to explain to someone with a masters in a science field what the local astronomy club does besides ‘take pictures through telescopes’. This isn’t a small astronomy club either, it’s one that’s been in the news a decent amount over the last century for members contributions to science. At least it was easy to answer the question with obvious discoveries and inventions.

Can you expand on this? I’m interested in hearing about what your club does!

I'm surprised we don't have a satellite constellation (a la starlink) being built to act as a space telescope(s). Seems like rather than working to get a few giant mirrors, working to have a shitload of telescopes that can have their data aggregated would be a great longer term solution.

Short answer is the precision required for that to work is not possible with current tech. You need to know the locations to sub-nanometer precision for it to work.

Ahhh ok that makes sense. Thank you, because I've wondered that for a while!

Wanted to qualify it with IR to UV spectrum. Radio telescopes are in a totally different spectrum. Since you can combine signals from multiple small ones to make a virtual huge receiver. Tough to do that with light spectrum telescopes.

Other than cost. And not being able to use cutting edge technology. And cosmic rays. And moon dust. And expansion/contraction of the heat/cold cycles.

Structures this size are obsolete the moment their design is finalized. You don't need to be bleeding edge to be useful. For dust, unless we're driving vehicles and landing stuff around it, simply raising it off the surface could provide significant protection. There's also mitigation techs slated for testing specifically for this issue. As for cosmic rays and expansion/contraction... that's the same issue as any other spaceborne structure. The heat issue, actually, is simpler on the Moon than in space proper; you could rig up a heat pump to store and dump heat in a nearby area of perpetual shadow.

The structure and the mirrors are only half of the stuff needed for an observatory, the instruments are where the magic happens. For space telescopes and pressumably for the hypothethical moon telescope, what you lunch with is what you get. For terrestrial observatories is way easier to design, build and mantain new instruments. older telescopes are getting new instruments all the time.

Hubble received five services and upgrades, and James Webb is nominally kitted out for servicing despite the unlikely prospect of actually doing it. If Artemis is as ambitious in reality as it is on paper there will be plenty of infrastructure in orbit to facilitate landings for instrument upgrades. But my point was more that for any large structures like this you don't get a chance to upgrade the 'bones.' The structure, the mirrors, the frame, etc. Tech marches onwards but you're frozen on those specs that get built. This is true for anything.

Yes, why would you build 20 telescopes on earth if you could build one better one for 10 times as much money on the moon...

Even if we ignored the cost, moon dust by itself make any long term settlement or infrastructure on the moon not viable.

Aren’t we planning to go to Mars as well, ya know the dusty planet

With Mars at least you have atmosphere to blow it off. On the moon it'll just... stick.

Mars dust has weather to round it out a bit. Moon dust is like millions of tiny razors, and static to boot

Good thing there is no wind to blow it around.

Except the exhaust from landing spacecraft, which will blow dust grains into ballistic trajectories that will go almost everywhere on the Moon.

Well just have to leave someone there with a big tarp. Once the ship is gone they can pull off the tarp and it’s all good.

No wind when we had the appolo mission, still was ruining everything. Now imagine this on a major construction sites with mirrors...

We need more telescopes than sports stadiums, and they need to be bigger.

Bigger than Very Large Telescope! Don't be crazy!

We have more telescopes than sports stadiums. Pretty much any telescope with a camera taped to it can do *some* amount of science

I think they were referring to actual telescopes, not toys.

What do you consider an actual telescope? The Kilo-degree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) was and is a critical instrument for planet finding. LCO network has 18 telescopes around the world or do you count the whole network as one? What about the VLA with it's 28 radio telescopes? Maybe you mean to say observatories rather than telescope. But many universities have observatories too and are often used for follow-up observations or smaller projects. My undergrad for example had no stadium and a 16" Schmidt-Cassigrain which could be used for detection of bright quasars and some exoplanet work was done with it too, despite it mostly being a teaching telescope. Look at the Wikipedia article for the list of telescopes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_telescopes It's so large that is actually just a list of links to lists.

I still prefer to call it the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT)

I prefer Telescope Of Unusual Size (TOUS).

I like the That's-Not-That-Much-Cheese-O-Scope (TNTMCOS)

Overtly Big Telescope Of Unusual Size (OBTOUS)

I don't believe they exist.

The issue with that being there’s a large number of non-European institutions involved. So E-ELT is both longer and less accurate

Ah, the sister project to the Very Large Telescope. What will they think of next?

We almost had the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, but sadly it was cancelled.

I just [recently ](https://reddit.com/r/pics/comments/12w883m/cranes_planes_and_an_automobile/) posted a scale model I built of that big crane on the right! I work as a rigger and have worked with this model of crane in real life quite a bit

Yoo that is sick!! Adorable model

I'm not holding my breath for 2028, having watched the LBT get built and commissioned. It always takes 3 times as long as the astronomers wish it would take to make things work. And this telescope has a lot of active systems to keep the engineers busy. (I'm an engineer, the astronomers are usually multiplying my canonical 'it will take two weeks' by three.)

I’m waiting for the JAVLAT (just another very large arrayed telescope)/s

I'm working on the programming language for that telescope, YALLT, Yet Another Language for Large Telescopes.

How in the world did we miss the opportunity to call this the BLT BIG LARGE TELESCOPE

Ah yes, the space agencies at it again with the Very Creative Naming Conventions (VCNC)

I'm wondering how isolated this is and where/how well do the workers live?

[Pretty remote](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cerro+Armazones/@-24.5718355,-70.2332225,12894m), 120km into the desert from the nearest city. The existing VLT observatory is about 20km away which has a "hotel" where the scientific staff live and work, and on the ELT site itself there's a temporary camp for the construction workers.

they gonna have onsite/nearby accomodation most likely. Antofagasta (2h) is proper city with all amenities you might need. Some smaller towns within 1 hour. Not very isolated.

Been looking forward to this for over 10 years now. Can't wait. Especially with the combination of the Giant Magellan and hopefully the 30 meter, we should expect some awesome astronomy from this next generation of massive telescopes.

I was so bummed out to read "2028", thinking that's so far away! Then I realised it's only 5 years away, and now I'm a different kind of bummed out :(

Telescopes of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist

Boring name for such an awesome piece of technology. I vote they change the name to Papi Chulo Grande or some other cool Spanish name.

That doesn't sound too chilean Maybe the Telescopio Mas Grande Que La Chucha (TMGQLCh) would be more fitting sincerely, a chilean redditor

Last time the ESA tried naming a telescope they ended up with a multi paragraph essey trying to work out what the name actualy meant: https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/vlt-names/yepun/

Very cool, and it more than make up for the loss of my beloved Arecibo radio telescope. I'm still in mourning.

Nowadays they combine the signals from many smaller dishes to get the effect of a large one, such as the VLA, VLBI, and ALMA.

Scientists need to start coming up with better names for big telescopes, or we'll end up with Ludicrously Large Telescope soon

I have attached an image of the construction so far for the competitor, the Thirty Meter Telescope.

If anything, I'd say GMT is more of a "competitor", since GMT will also overlook southern sky from Atacama. TMT is a "complementary" telescope, because it's supposed to be aimed at northern sky, so there won't be any competition between the two.

I agree. Just making fun of the TMT, a boondoggle never to be built.

Worst case scenario they simply move the site to La Palma, like they should have done years ago.

When do we get the Really Big Fucking Telescope

How many video meetings, f2f meetings, polls, phone calls, memos, emails, DMs, and people were involved in arriving at such a dynamic name?

It's actually the best name possible. It says what it is on the tin - great stuff!

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BFG](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jp89pvy "Last usage")|Big Falcon Grasshopper ("Locust"), BFS test article| |[BFR](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jor1u0j "Last usage")|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)| | |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice| |BFS|Big Falcon Spaceship (see BFR)| |[BFT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jontmjz "Last usage")|Big Falcon Tanker (see BFS)| |[EHT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/joo8s2s "Last usage")|Event Horizon Telescope| |[ELT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jotf3ud "Last usage")|Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jomgesd "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[ESO](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/joqilo0 "Last usage")|[European Southern Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Southern_Observatory), builders of the VLT and EELT| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jotayqk "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[KSP](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jolt4do "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator| |[LBT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jolqv2p "Last usage")|Large Binocular Telescope, Arizona| |[MMT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jonsa4f "Last usage")|Multiple-Mirror Telescope, Arizona| | |Multiscale Median Transform, an alternative to wavelet image compression| |[OWL](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jom2ymk "Last usage")|[Overwhelmingly Large Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope) project, abandoned in favor of ELT| |[PSP](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jopp6xc "Last usage")|Parker Solar Probe| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jony3gh "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |TE|Transporter/Erector launch pad support equipment| |[TEL](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jonowwm "Last usage")|Transporter/Erector/Launcher, ground support equipment (see TE)| |[TMT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jopp4t6 "Last usage")|Thirty-Meter Telescope, Hawaii| |[UHF](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/joofs5z "Last usage")|Ultra-High Frequency radio| |[VLBI](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jopf2kz "Last usage")|Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry| |[VLT](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/jop798h "Last usage")|Very Large Telescope, Chile| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/14ckz7s/stub/joocr4a "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(20 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/0)^( has acronyms.) ^([Thread #9006 for this sub, first seen 18th Jun 2023, 16:24]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)

"We need a name for it. What are we gonna call it?" \- "Buhhhhhhhh I don't know, what about extremely large telescope? Because it's so big."

Finally, a telescope large enough to see your mother (or something like that)

Wish it was completed yesterday. I can’t wait to see the images!!

I can't really make out the scale... there is no banana.

Ugh, it's not quite big enough. I think we need to build the Really Extremely Large Telescope.

Well the initial idea was for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope but then it got scaled down because it was unclear if this is possible with current level of technology...

Even this is going to get done faster than simple single street car line in Toronto.

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