Open main menu

File:Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg

Original file(SVG file, nominally 512 × 536 pixels, file size: 168 KB)

Render this image in .

This file is from Wikimedia Commons and may be used by other projects. The description on its file description page there is shown below.

Summary

Description

[edit subpage]

English: Comparison of nominal sizes of primary mirrors of notable optical reflecting telescopes, and a few other objects. Dotted lines show sizes of round mirrors that would have had equivalent light-gathering ability.

The telescopes shown on this comparison chart are listed below, ordered in each sub-section by (effective) mirror/lens area, low to high, and then by actual/planned first light date, old to new. The "present-day" status is given as of the beginning of 2024. See also List of largest optical reflecting telescopes.

Largest refractors (for comparison):

1) Yerkes Observatory's 40-inch (1.02 m) refractor, 1893 (largest refractor consistently used for scientific observations)
2) Great Paris Exhibition Telescope, 49 inches (1.24 m), 1900 (largest refractor ever built; had practically no scientific usage)

Ground-based reflectors:

3) Hooker Telescope, 100 inches (2.54 m), 1917; world's largest telescope from 1917 to 1949
4) Multiple Mirror Telescope, 186 inches (4.72 m) effective, 1979–1998; 6.5 m, from 1998
5) LAMOST (Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope), 4.9 m effective at best, 2009
6) Hale Telescope, 200 inches (5.1 m), 1949; world's largest telescope from 1949 to 1975
7) BTA-6, 6 m, 1975; world's largest telescope from 1975 to 1990 (when it was surpassed by the partially-completed Keck I telescope)
8) Large Zenith Telescope, 6 m, 2003; largest liquid-mirror telescope ever built; decommissioned in 2019
9) Magellan Telescopes, two 6.5‑m individual telescopes, 2000 and 2002;
10) Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), 6.68 m effective (8.4‑m mirror, but with a big hole in the middle), planned 2025
11) Gemini Observatory, 8.1 m, 1999 and 2001
12) Subaru Telescope, 8.2 m, 1999; largest monolithic (i.e. non-segmented) mirror in an optical telescope from 1999 to 2005
13) Southern African Large Telescope, 9.2 m effective, 2005 (largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere)
14) Hobby–Eberly Telescope, 10 m effective, 1996
15) Gran Telescopio Canarias, 10.4 m, 2007 (world's largest single-aperture optical telescope)
16) Large Binocular Telescope, 11.8 m effective (two 8.4‑m telescopes on a common mount), 2005 and 2006; each individual telescope has the largest monolithic (i.e. non-segmented) mirror in an optical telescope, while the combined effective light collecting area is the largest for any optical telescope in non-interferometric mode
17) Keck Telescopes, 14 m effective (two 10‑m individual telescopes), 1993 and 1996; similarly to VLT, the two telescopes were combined only for interferometric observations rather than to simply achieve larger light collecting area; furthermore, this mode has been discontinued
18) Very Large Telescope, 16.4 m effective (four 8.2 m individual telescopes), 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2000; total effective light collecting area would have been world's largest for any present-day optical telescope, but the instrumentation required to obtain a combined incoherent focus was not built
19) Giant Magellan Telescope, 22.0 m effective, planned for early 2030s
20) Thirty Meter Telescope, 30 m effective, planned (no specific dates yet)
21) Extremely Large Telescope, 39.3 m effective, planned 2028
22) Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, 100 m, cancelled

Space telescopes:

23) Gaia, 1.45 m × 0.5 m (area equivalent to a 0.96‑m round mirror), 2013
24) Kepler, 1.4 m, 2009
25) Hubble Space Telescope, 2.4 m, 1990
26) James Webb Space Telescope, 6.5 m effective, 2022 (largest space optical telescope to date)

Radio telescopes for comparison:

27) Arecibo Observatory's 305‑m dish; largest fully-filled single-aperture telescope from 1963 to 2016 (the largest-aperture telescope of any kind is the very-sparsely-filled RATAN-600 radio telescope)
28) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical [radio] Telescope (FAST), 500‑m dish (effective aperture of ≈300 m), 2016; world's largest fully-filled single-aperture telescope (since 2016)

Other objects for comparison:

29) Human height, 1.77 m on average
30) Tennis court, 78 × 36 ft (23.77 × 10.97 m)
31) Basketball court, 94 × 50 ft (28.7 × 15.2 m)
Source Own work
Author Cmglee; data on holes in mirrors provided by an anonymous user from IP 71.41.210.146
Other versions
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=en (English)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=he (Hebrew)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=pl (Polish)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=ru (Russian)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=sl (Slovenian)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=zh (Chinese)

SVG development
InfoField
 
The source code of this SVG is invalid due to T errors.
 
This W3C-invalid diagram was created with Inkscape, or with something else.
 
 This diagram is translated using SVG switch elements: all translations are stored in the same file.
This image has been assessed using the Quality image guidelines and is considered a Quality image.

العربية  جازايرية  беларуская  беларуская (тарашкевіца)  български  বাংলা  català  čeština  Cymraeg  Deutsch  Schweizer Hochdeutsch  Zazaki  Ελληνικά  English  Esperanto  español  eesti  euskara  فارسی  suomi  français  galego  עברית  हिन्दी  hrvatski  magyar  հայերեն  Bahasa Indonesia  italiano  日本語  Jawa  ქართული  한국어  kurdî  Lëtzebuergesch  lietuvių  македонски  മലയാളം  मराठी  Bahasa Melayu  Nederlands  Norfuk / Pitkern  polski  português  português do Brasil  rumantsch  română  русский  sicilianu  slovenčina  slovenščina  shqip  српски / srpski  svenska  தமிழ்  తెలుగు  ไทย  Tagalog  toki pona  Türkçe  українська  vèneto  Tiếng Việt  中文  中文(简体)  中文(繁體)  +/−

Licensing

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses:
w:en:Creative Commons
attribution share alike
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You are free:
  • to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
  • attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  • share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.
GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.
You may select the license of your choice.

Captions

Add a one-line explanation of what this file represents

Items portrayed in this file

depicts

image/svg+xml

80eb7eebb4072cdb3b15c5edd9885fae9970a4a8

171,712 byte

536 pixel

512 pixel

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current05:37, 23 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 05:37, 23 February 2024512 × 536 (168 KB)DmitTrixremoved outline on scale’s components, fixed units alignment, added Chinese for units; restored more numeric character references for invisible/indistinguishable characters (such as RTL marks, non-breaking spaces/hyphens); fixed Slovenian where "mirror" was wrongly used instead of "lens"; slightly expanded refractor telescopes’ descriptions in most langs;fixed Tennis court’s text position for Chinese

The following 2 pages use this file:

Metadata