Since this thing is so big, forgive me if I start with a few conceptual views. Here's an early conceptual design from 2003 (JM). By then, the preliminary planning had already been underway for several years--here's a 1998 paper by Tony Stark et al; it documents a 1997 planning meeting on the project.
Here is a 2006 conceptual design of the telescope itself; this is a bit closer to the way it really turned out (VP).
|And as if the telescope itself doesn't dominate the Pole horizon already even without the ground shield seen in the above views, it dwarfs the adjacent DSL...here are a few more views to emphasize the size as it were:|
Okay, we know this is a "10 meter telescope" which means that the diameter of the primary mirror, the large curved dish, is, well, 10 meters, or about the same distance (33 feet) that the Pole marker gets moved every year. In the planning stages this used to be called the "8-meter telescope"--I don't know what happened, but in any case the image from the outer 1-meter ring of the primary mirror will usually be discounted so maybe it really is an 8-meter instrument, which is what they used to call it. As for that big ground shield, the outside diameter would have been 144 feet...almost as big as the (165') dome. But since it was to be conical rather than dome-shaped, the overall structure would have been bigger than the dome. And speaking of the dome, the ground shield structure would have been fabricated by TEMCOR, the same folks that brought us the dome! The ground shield was to be made of 1/16" thick aluminum panels (supported by a steel frame) with an epoxy phenolic coating so that snow won't stick to it...therefore the bottom of the truncated-cone-shaped shield was to be open. By the way, the primary mirror itself has electric heaters. Okay, enough of these drawings, on to the real stuff...|