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I think it normally depends on the mountain. As I see it, most people have an issue with destroying mountains for things like mining because 1) they disagree with the reasoning for it, 2)it's in places where people can see the damage, and more importantly 3) those 'mountains' are often much lower altitude and are decent habitats for critters with significant water runoff that's contaminated by 'mountain top removal'. When you're talking 9-10K feet up, beyond the tree line, there's far less habitat being destroyed (granted, something likely lives there that's now dead or displaced). That means it's not 0 damage done, but far less damage to what most people consider important. Very few people care about damaging the rock itself, mostly Shinto and Buddhists I would guess. Personally I find this a good trade off of damage vs possible gain, but of course I don't live there.
I'm wondering how this is better than the VLTA http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/vlt/
I expected there to be no more giant telescopes made now that they know how to combine smaller ones to simulate large ones. I wonder why they went this way on this project?

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>> ^eric3579:

The very high angular resolving power will be achieved when used in conjunction with a ground-based system of radio-telescopes and interferometrical methods, operating at wavelengths of 1.35–6.0, 18.0 and 92.0 cm. With its Earth-based companions, it will form a network able to provide detailed images of the universe at 1,000 times the resolution attainable using the Hubble Space Telescope. -wiki
>> ^rychan:
>> ^rich_magnet:
The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.

Yeah, how can any radio telescope be remotely as sharp as a visible light telescope? At that frequency it's hard to get high angular resolution from a single dish.



Ok, that's believable. But the title and summary clearly imply that this single instrument will be 1,000 times sharper than the HST.

The very high angular resolving power will be achieved when used in conjunction with a ground-based system of radio-telescopes and interferometrical methods, operating at wavelengths of 1.35–6.0, 18.0 and 92.0 cm. With its Earth-based companions, it will form a network able to provide detailed images of the universe at 1,000 times the resolution attainable using the Hubble Space Telescope. -wiki

>> ^rychan:

>> ^rich_magnet:
The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.

Yeah, how can any radio telescope be remotely as sharp as a visible light telescope? At that frequency it's hard to get high angular resolution from a single dish.

>> ^rich_magnet:

The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.


Yeah, how can any radio telescope be remotely as sharp as a visible light telescope? At that frequency it's hard to get high angular resolution from a single dish.

The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.

>> ^serosmeg:
What the hell is a metre?


http://lmgtfy.com/?q=metre&l=1

>> ^jimnms:
If it sees in visible light, how can it observe planets orbiting a black hole at the center of the Milky Way?



3:12 - It's watching the stars that orbit the black hole.

Milky Way time-lapse, taken from the Paranal Observatory. Home of the VLT.

Knowing you have a love for all things spacy, I thought you might enjoy these.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Milky-Way-Time-Lapse
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Very-Large-Telescope-VLT

The Very Large Telescope