ANTARIKSA — Do you still remember the last full moon on October 28? Of the many cool images of the Full Hunters Moon circulating, this photo may be the difference, when the hunter dwarfs the world’s largest telescope, and the spot seems to devour it.
This photo from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows
the steel frame of the world’s largest visible and infrared telescope illuminated by the rising full moon. Construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is still underway at Cerro Armazones, Atacama Desert, Chile. The monster telescope is expected to see its first light in 2028.
“In this image, a flashback to the famous scene in (1982 film) ‘ET’. We see the steel frame of the telescope dome illuminated eerily in the moonlight,” ESO officials said in a statement.
The building stands at a height of 80 meters and weighs 6,100 tons. When complete, the entire structure will rotate 360 degrees to observe the night sky.
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At 39.3 meters wide, the ELT will be the world’s largest telescope for visible and infrared light. For the record, there are radio telescopes that are bigger than that. The ELT will house five separate mirrors, with the largest consisting of 798 hexagonal segments.
In the ESO photo, the moon looks very large behind the telescope dome located high on Cerro Armazones, a mountain that is 3,046 meters high. The appearance is caused by the optical effect of the lunar illusion, which causes the moon to appear larger near the horizon compared to higher in the sky.
The photo was taken on October 28, 2023, when millions of people in Europe, Africa, Asia and parts of Australia enjoyed the lunar eclipse.
ESO officials took the photo from a distance of about 20 kilometers, near the entrance to the Paranal Observatory, where ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located.
“It’s not every day that the moon is so perfectly positioned behind a mountain peak, so a photo session was carefully planned by the Paranal Photo Club to capture the moment,” ESO officials said.
In the new image, released on October 30, the moon is rising in the night sky, with only a small portion still tucked beneath the Cerro Armazones mountain. The telescope domes and construction cranes looked small in the bright golden full moon.
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Although the moon appears very large in the new photo, it is actually just an optical illusion. At that time, the moon was playing tricks on our minds, otherwise known as the lunar illusion. This is usually experienced by people who see the moon when it sets or rises. However, the actual size of the moon never changes. Source: Space.com
2023-11-02 17:23:00
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