Awesome telescope, but color me unimpressed with the mountain blast. I was expecting the top 1/5 of the mountain to blow, not a puff of smoke!

Came for the blast..stayed for the telescope.

Oh please, may I have some unimpressive colors as well?? Which color does one use to render realistically blown-smoke up asses with??

White traditionally, but purple would be classier.

Regal, even...*cough

cheers to the purple smoke and jeez...guy's voice in the vids' hauntingly familiar...(and no, it's not me)

Wouldn't we normally be against blowing up mountain tops?

I can't deny that I too am OK with this as it furthers our understanding of the universe by building this. I just can't help but to feel hypocritical.

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?

Just to play devils advocate....

a ground based optical telescope? Really?

Surely no matter how good your optics, you will still suffer from atmospheric interference. Wouldn't we be better off with another hubble?

You may find your answers here

I stand corrected.

^ Eric's offering covered the curiosity and I had a point-by-point for newtboy but my only remaining suggestion would be to continue to guess about Buddhist concerns regarding earthly affairs and maybe practice the Dharma for another gadjillion ideal lifetimes and figure that one out

Extremely Large Telescope?

Could the marketing department not think of anything more creative?

*spacey

To be fair, their scientists themselves refer to the event that created absolutely all of the matter in the entire universe in a single instant as "the big bang". I like Calvin's suggestion of "The Horrendous Space Kablooie" better.

I know, right, now what are they going to call the next one that's even bigger?