James Davenport

By training, I'm a stellar astronomer.

I look at stars with sort of classical optical telescopes that you would look through with your eyes and we attach digital cameras to.

This is not the area that SETI has worked on for like 60 years.

But we have put a lot of effort into it for lots of other astrophysics and astronomy reasons because stars are bright and there's fun physics.

There's lots to learn there in the cosmos.

And that's what I spent 20 years doing.

And then this realization that we're putting all this money into optical astronomy.

Why aren't we looking for maybe the most interesting thing, looking for life, looking to answer these questions about whether or not we're alone?

My inner eight-year-old, my inner Star Trek nerd started putting this together that we should use the data that we have and try to figure out how to pull the knowledge from 60 years of radio astronomy and apply it into this optical visible light astronomy.

My hope in pushing this from the radio into the visible light, into the infrared and other domains of astronomy that are so active is that we can actually push this from a hot tub to maybe an Olympic swimming pool.

So just yesterday, the very first like... Yesterday being January 14th.

Right.

The very first like commissioning image from the telescope from like their engineering camera was shown.

Wow.

And it's beautiful and it's early days, but like the telescope is now being tested and everything is being aligned.

So it has gone from 20 years of development to a reality.

This telescope, it's going to sit in Chile and for 10 years create this mosaic movie of the sky.

And it's going to watch the sky every night.

with the world's largest digital camera built in California, shipped all the way to Chile.

This camera is the size of a small car, right?