Cerro Armazones in Chile

A zoom onto the Cerro Armazones in Chile, as seen in Google Earth. Cerro Armazones is a possible home for the future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).

The ELT programme office has studied half a dozen potential sites for the future ELT observatory, which, with its 40-metre-class diameter, will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Various aspects need to be considered in the site selection process. On the ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee’s final short list for the recommended site, Armazones is also the committee’s preferred site, because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing Paranal Observatory.

Note that ESO's standard Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license does not apply to the Google Earth part of this video.