ELT: the Emperor's Large Telescope?

Abstract

Access to Extremely Large Telescopes with apertures greater than 20m is at the top of Australia's Decadal Plan wishlist for optical astronomy. Despite this, there has been relatively little public debate of the technical issues and no presentations (that I am aware of) locally detailing the architectures and trade-offs for these new generation telescopes. Do these projects offer value for money? Do the three major competitor projects all offer similar capabilities and risks? What are ELT's likely strengths and weaknesses? In this talk, I present a grad-student level overview of some of the main issues with the primary aim of sparking further and more widespread community engagement with this critical component of our future optical facilities. (There will be a 30 minutes discussion session afterwards for those interested.)