E-ELT, European Extremely Large Telescope Options

[monitorlizard]

I read an article on OWL two or three years ago that said it would need a supercomputer larger than anything that had ever been built just to run the atmospheric compensation system for all the mirror segments! Of course, back then we only had puny supercomputers of five or ten teraflops.

[helvick]

Optical Interferometry may be hard but there seems to be plenty of activity:
Optical Long Baseline Interferometry News (NASA)

Which throws up some nice links to the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer and the Chara Array. The NPOI has produced some very cool stuff including this movie of the binary Mizar.

[dilo]

...and, one day, we will make arrays of thousands huge space telescopes interferometrically linked, floating inside the extremely dark and big shadow of Jupiter or Saturn!

[karolp]

I talked on the phone with a friend of mine today and we were wondering what imaging capabilities this monster might have regarding the Solar System. He told me that being 4 times larger than Keck it would have 16 times better resolution. I was wondering whether it could actually image any objects in the Oort Cloud. What magnitude could it go to? 30? 40?

[ngunn]

I talked on the phone with a friend of mine today and we were wondering what imaging capabilities this monster might have regarding the Solar System. He told me that being 4 times larger than Keck it would have 16 times better resolution. I was wondering whether it could actually image any objects in the Oort Cloud. What magnitude could it go to? 30? 40?

That would be 16 times the light gathering or about 3 magnitudes. Theoretical angular resolution, though, would only be 4 times better. In practice ground-based telescopes never reach their theoretical resolution anyhow, it's limited by the cleverness of the adaptive optics and I'm not sure how the difficulties of adaptive optics increase with size.