Photograph by Joe McNally

The twin-mirrored Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona will deliver images ten times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope’s.

Photograph by Joe McNally

The two 8.4-meter mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, northeast of Tucson, Arizona, can be turned to the horizontal, facing straight up into space through the observatory’s open roof. They can also be moved to the vertical, looking out from the mountain toward the horizon, and turn 360 degrees, so the telescope can look anywhere in the sky. Together, the mirrors will produce images with a resolution of a 22.8-meter telescope.

Photograph by Joe McNally

Window on the Universe
Spread across 128 monitors at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing facility in California, colorized red and green nebulae span a vast region of our galaxy. Called hyperwall-2, the system helps researchers visualize huge amounts of data from the latest telescopes.

Photograph by Scala/Art Resource

Beginnings
Four hundred years ago Galileo gave birth to modern astronomy with the humblest of instruments, now preserved at a history of science museum in Florence, Italy. A one-and-a-half-inch lens displayed in an ornate frame (at bottom) was ground in 1609. Others followed. Fitted into simple wooden tubes just a few feet long, Galileo’s lenses magnified the heavens, bringing Earth’s moon, sunspots, and nearby planets into focus.

Photograph by Mark Thiessen

Mirror Works
Ten-pound glass chunks are loaded into a honeycombed mold at the University of Arizona. Hollow chambers reduce mass and help produce a lightweight mirror that adjusts more quickly to ambient temperature changes.

Photograph by Mark Thiessen

Mirror Works
As the glass melts, the mold spins to create a concave surface that gathers distant light and refocuses it inside a telescope.

Photograph by Joe McNally

Detail Man
Beneath the University of Arizona football stadium, a technician pores over the surface of the 8.4-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope mirror, looking for major flaws. Over a period of months the glass will be polished to within one millionth of an inch of the precise concave shape required. A thin coating of aluminum will create the reflective surface.

Photograph by Mark Thiessen

A researcher’s gloved hands hold a delicate sensor with 111 million light-sensing pixels in a dust- and static-free room at the University of Arizona’s Imaging Technology Laboratory. It cost $150,000 and required months to manufacture. Two of these sensors will be installed in one of the Large Binocular Telescope’s cameras.

Photograph by Pascal Martinez, ESO

Wide Receivers
Massive trucks will drive 66 12- and 7-meter antennas into the Chilean desert to form a single huge radio telescope spanning miles.

Photograph by Herbert Zodet, ESO

Wide Receivers
The Atacama array, seen here in a rendering, will collect data from within the clouds of dust and gas that gave rise to stars, planets, and galaxies. “It will enable us finally to penetrate cold, dark regions of the universe,” says project scientist Richard Hills.

Photograph by Joe McNally

Sharper Sight
The 5.1-meter Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, California, has done cutting-edge science for 60 years, making key discoveries about galaxies and quasars. An adaptive optics laser that shoots 56 miles up now lets Hale produce even sharper and more detailed views.

Photograph by Joe McNally

A laser beam fired from the Hale Telescope, northeast of San Diego, California, excites sodium atoms 56 miles above the Earth, creating an “artificial star” reference point that is used to correct for distortions caused by turbulence in the atmosphere. Based on readings of light from this artificial star, a six-inch deformable mirror is adjusted as many as 2,000 times a second to eliminate blur. Only a handful of other telescopes now in operation employ this laser-guide star technology, which can enable ground-based instruments to collect images as clear as their space-based counterparts, even in some areas of the sky difficult to examine before.

Photograph by Joe McNally

Cloud Free
Crowded in prime territory, the Subaru, Keck I and II, and NASA Infrared telescopes (left to right) sit atop Hawaii’s 13,796-foot Mauna Kea. Set above 40 percent of the atmosphere, they offer one of Earth’s clearest views into space.

Photograph by Joe McNally

Triple Vision
Portraits of the Crab Nebula captured in visible, infrared, and x-ray wavelengths (left to right) are projected on screens in Monument Valley, Utah, in a long exposure beneath a star-filled sky. Telescopes of the next decade will reveal our universe in ways never known before.