How do the latest Earth-based telescopes compare to the Hubble? I noticed these pictures of Uranus taken by the Keck telescope:

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Compared to this photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope:

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Folks are doing some impressive stuff with multiple mirrors and algorithms for removing atmospheric effects. Looks like these are the big guns currently:

Palomar - 5 meter single mirror
BTA - 6 meter, single mirror
VLT - 8.2 meter multi-mirror
Keck - 10 meter multi-mirror

There are some intersting plans for huge new Earth-based telescopes like the Califormina 30-meter telescope, the Euro-50 and the 100-meter OWL (Overwhelming Large Telescope!).

The downside of adaptive optics is they work very well in IR, but not so well in visible light. That's probably the area where Hubble still reigns as the king.

http://www.eso.org/projects/vlti/
in a superb location and the Auxiliary Telescope(s) are Belgian-made ( AMOS Liége )

http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2004/pr-01-04.html

Yeah, location is everything. There are a lot of great observatories in the Andes. The Keck on a mountain top in Hawaii, which has superb atmospheric stability. I ran across this nice list of the largest optical telescopes: Big Eyes

The ESO is the "Palomar" of the southern hemisphere. One of my favorite astronomical photos is this picture of one of the ESO telescopes, with the wonderful southern sky above it:

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OWL is now planned to be 'only' 30m - 100m was just a bit too overwhelming!

What a pity... There's things where you actually need a 100 m telescope.

But on the other hand, oversized projects tend to be more expensive than planned worst case scenario being cancellation of the whole project.

Hopefully the "assembly line production" of smaller mirrors becomes a really inexpensive method to create extremely large telescopes.

Personally I think it is the right decision. Consider that 100m is the size of the largest radio telescopes, the challenges of building an optical 100m are immense. I think it's wise to get some 30m's up and running before thinking about 100m.

Well, with the upcoming IYA 2009 ( International Year of Astronomy ) during which we'll celebrate 400 years of the telescope, the United Nations will debate a draft treaty about what action should be taken if an asteroid is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.
Meanwhile, shouldn't we keep our eyes on Apophis

Well, these ground-based observations are doing an outstanding job in searching for Earth-crossers:
http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/
http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/


More on 2009: http://www.astronomy2009.org/

Extremely Little Telescope:

http://www.astronomynow.com/080609Extremel...ikeplanets.html

Heh, heh, heh...cute!

Kind of interesting that the pros are apparently taking a page from the amateurs in this project. Exoplanet occultation searches are really taking off in the am community.

Earth-like planets? According to their paper, their detection sensitivity would be limited to Jupiter-like planets...