How big is your telescope?

I love the way that sci­entific insti­tu­tions name telescopes.

It started with the “large” tele­scopes like the Large Bin­ocular Tele­scope (LBT), an 11.4-metre tele­scope (made up of two 8.4-metre mirrors) in the Pinaleno Moun­tains of Arizona; the Very Large Tele­scope (VLT), an array of four 8.2-metre tele­scopes in the Atacama Desert in Chile; and the Large Synoptic Survey Tele­scope (LSST), an 8.4-metre tele­scope also planned for the Chilean desert.

After the “large” tele­scopes came the “giant” tele­scopes: the Giant Magellan Tele­scope (GMT) is 21.4-metre tele­scope under con­struc­tion at the Las Campanas Obser­vatory in Chile and the Giant Seg­mented Mirror Tele­scope (GSMT) is a planned 20 – 30-metre telescope.

Some of the larger tele­scopes, like the Thirty Metre Tele­scope (TMT) have dis­ap­point­ingly simple names; it seems that after using up “giant” they went back to “large”, but with adverbs. There’s the 42-metre European Extremely Large Tele­scope (EELT) and my personal favourite: the 60-metre Over­whelm­ingly Large Tele­scope (OWL).