The Extremely Large Telescope: all coming together on top of Cerro Armazones!

Talk by Prof. Colin Cunningham, Honorary Professor, University of Edinburgh and Heriot Watt University. We will also have the Sky in December.

After many years of design and development, the ELT is now more than 70% complete. I will show the incredible engineering that has gone into it, tell you about the UK Astronomy Centre’s role is in Edinburgh, and then conclude by predicting some of the amazing science that will be possible when it is complete.

I started working at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in 1987 and retired in 2019. My roles included project manager for the SCUBA camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, systems engineer for the SPIRE instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory, and deputy director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre. I first became involved in the ELT in 2005, leading the instrument design studies in the EU funded ELT Design Study, and was principal investigator for the UK £80M instrumentation and R&D programme from 2005 to 2016. In 2017 I was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professorship in systems engineering at Edinburgh University.

Image Credit: ESO/G. Vecchia
This drone image, taken in April 2026, shows a stunning view above the dome of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), under construction atop Cerro Armazones, a mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The sliding doors are partially open, showing the top of the telescope’s main structure inside. The catwalks running along the edges of the sliding doors convey the sheer size of the 80-m high dome.