Ground-Based Observatories & Instrumentation Frontier
The largest eyes humanity has ever built are rising on mountaintops in Chile and Hawaii, and the deserts of Australia and South Africa. This is the frontier that makes them work — the giant telescopes of the coming decade, the adaptive optics that erase the atmosphere, the detectors that count single photons, and the interferometers that see sharper than any single mirror could.
Explore the frontier
- Next-Generation Facilities
The giant ground observatories of the coming decade — the Giant Magellan Telescope, the ngVLA, and the Cherenkov Telescope Array.
3 entries - Instrumentation
The optical systems telescopes are built around — the adaptive-optics chain, spectrographs, coronagraphs, and starshades.
7 entries - Detector Technologies
How photons become signal — from the optical CCD to the superconducting detectors of the millimetre sky.
5 entries - Interferometry
Combining separated apertures to see with the resolution of a far larger telescope — radio, optical, and continent-spanning VLBI.
4 entries - Observing Techniques
Beating the atmosphere and the detector — lucky imaging, speckle imaging, stacking, and fringe tracking.
4 entries
Next-generation facilities
- Cherenkov Telescope ArrayNext-generation facilityUnder construction
The next-generation ground-based observatory for very-high-energy gamma rays, an array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes being built across two sites — one in the northern hemisphere on La Palma and one in the southern hemisphere in Chile — to catch the faint blue flashes that gamma rays make in the atmosphere. The largest such observatory ever built.
- Giant Magellan TelescopeNext-generation facilityUnder construction
A next-generation optical and near-infrared telescope under construction at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, using seven 8.4-metre mirror segments to form a single light-collecting surface with a resolving power far beyond today's largest telescopes. One of the extremely large telescopes of the coming decade, alongside the ELT and TMT.
- Next Generation Very Large ArrayNext-generation facilityProposed
A proposed radio interferometer, designed as the successor to the Very Large Array and a complement to ALMA, that would observe the centimetre-to-millimetre sky with far greater sensitivity and resolution — imaging planet-forming discs, molecular gas, and the distant universe. Led by the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Data & provenance
Each facility, instrumentation technique, detector, and observing method is a first-class knowledge-graph entity resolved through the Scientific Data Engine, reusing the ground observatories, the adaptive-optics, interferometry, and spectroscopy methods, the SPHERE, MUSE, and HIRES instruments, and the wavelength bands already in the graph. Curated from ESO, NOIRLab, NRAO, and NASA. Facilities under construction or proposed are stated as such. See source quality.