Telescopes

Comparison of nominal sizes of primary mirrors of notable optical telescopes. Dotted lines show mirrors with equivalent light-gathering ability. Thanks to user at 71.41.210.146 for data on holes in mirrors.

Blue markers are for telescopes in the USA, including Hawaii, except the dark blue one. That's in Russia. The green ones are all in Chile and the black ones are in space. The other colors are in other countries. See the the sports courts in the lower corners to get an idea of the size. There is also a human to the lower right of the big green one.
    The ones with the slightly faded colors (all on the right side of the image) have not been built yet. If you step back and looks at the whole image you will notice that there is a large gray circle that fills the entire space - the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. It was a European idea but no one was willing to fund it.
    Chile seems to be the hot spot for telescopes these days. There is also a giant radio telescope there. It cost almost as much as the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was expected to cost.

The LSST’s camera will include a filter-changing mechanism and shutter. This animation shows that mechanism, which allows the camera to view different wavelengths; the camera is capable of viewing light from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared (0.3-1 μm) wavelengths.

LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) is under construction. This one is a little different from most other telescopes built for making astronomical observations. Instead of looking at stuff that is too small to see, it is going to record the entire sky at some ridiculous level of detail using a 3 gigapixel camera. That means the sensor is going to capture 400 times as much detail as your typical smartphone. This much detail means a whole boat load of data: LSST will generate a vast public archive of data—approximately 6 million gigabytes per year, or the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular 8-megapixel digital camera every night. - symmetry magazine

     The idea is they can look at the sky one week, and then look at it a week later and see what's different. I mean besides the moon. We don't need a telescope for that. Since something is always happening somewhere, they hope to learn something. We shall see.

Via Detroit Steve.