ESO adds ELT webcam.
A part of living on Earth before the Internet was knowing that even if you couldn't see them, people all over the planet were out there thinking, dreaming, and making progress you might one day hear about. A part of living on Earth after the Internet's birth is being able to know about it, and even see it.
The European Space Agency's bases of operations in the Chilean Atacama Desert continue to serve as this kind of symbol of humanity for me. Like any good centre for astronomy, they publish wondrous photos and curiosity-fuelling headlines regularly, enabled by the observations of their collection of ground-based telescopes. But when my mind turns to ESO, I almost like to think more about the everyday: the staff who work on building and maintaining the scopes above and below the floors, the observers sitting through the night at computers deciding where to point them and wiling away the odd thread of boredom as raw data comes in, and the supportive figures minding the quality of the lodging and transportation. That kind of image can be even more reassuring, more fulfilling to reflect on than the publications, because publications merely indicate progress while the "everyday" underlies it.
To help convey that sense of the everyday, ESO has offered static-image webcams (which I think I even prefer to live streaming video) of the telescopes themselves, including detailed panoramas deserving of viewers' full screens and suspension of disbelief about their true distances from the place.
They've just added one such webcam on Cerro Armazones, the site of the Extremely Large Telescope, long planned and now under early construction. It's not even contested that the ELT will be the world's largest ground-based telescope, with a main mirror spanning 39 metres.
As I'm typing, the camera's view shows two storeys of assembled concrete and a third of structural beams, materials and equipment scattered all around like a rendered-real version of a child's playroom floor, and a team of cranes. The publications will be ones that are currently impossible, and there's more to read about what they will contain. Meanwhile, we wait within this finite span of time after the birth of the Internet, with the ability to see its current, unfinished form, being worked on each day, and to know it's really out there.