Seminar Series - 20 May 2025 - Prof Mark Casali

The monthly Seminar Series for May will be on 20 May. This month's speaker is Prof Mark Casali from Macquarie University, who will talk about 'A Tale of 40 Years of Large Telescope development'.

His abstract: A revolution in large telescope design began in the early 1990s driven by both the computer age and advances in manufacturing. These advances resulted in two new types of telescope design pioneered by the Keck telescope (segmented primary) on the one hand and ESO’s VLT (thin monolithic mirror) on the other. By the early 2000s both approaches were mature and fully functional. Adaptive optics then brought a new dimension to telescope performance. While the development of AO was slow and difficult, it eventually succeeded in becoming a standard and indispensable part of telescope technology. The culmination of all these developments can be found in the Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in Chile on Cerro Armazones.