Professor Richard McDermid

My involvement with the European Southern Observatory, or ESO, is through an instrument that we're building for the European Southern Observatory called MAVIS.

It's actually an acronym of acronyms.

So the M stands for multi-conjugate adaptive optics.

And so that's a technique that helps us correct for the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere.

So that's the M, assisted visible imager and spectrograph.

So that's why we shortened it to Mavis, because otherwise it's a bit of a mouthful.

So Mavis, it's a one-of-a-kind instrument.

There's nothing like this that currently exists in the world.

And it's bringing together a number of different technologies, hence the long name.

But it's also feeding a camera that can take images.

And then also this integral spectrograph called an integral field spectrograph.

ESO has four 8-metre telescopes, that's the four largest operational telescopes that they have.

Mavis is going on one of those, which itself has very special capabilities.

So basically ESO have adapted one of these 8-metre telescopes with additional capabilities that involve multiple lasers.

So if you look up online information about ESO, you often see telescopes with exciting laser shoots up.

One of them has multiple lasers, so four of them.

That's part of the technology that makes this telescope special.

The other part is that one of its big mirrors, not the eight meter one, but the very next one that the light hits, called the secondary mirror.

That secondary mirror is also very large for such a device.

It's like over one meter diameter.