Rename the E-ELT!
18 Aug 2009, 09:34 UTC
ESO
The E-ELT is the European Extremely Large Telescope, a planned 42m diameter telescope currently undergoing its design phase, and scheduled to see “first light” around 2018. I propose here to abandon the name E-ELT and rename it to something more catchy. Why?
The current name is simply cumbersome and difficult to memorize, for the public as well as for funding agencies. Nowadays public relations is rather important even in science. Why was “Hubble” so successful, in the sense that almost everybody, even “average” people on the street, know about it? One reason certainly is because 1% of Hubble’s observing time was assigned to take “pretty pictures” that can be used for public relations work. That helped making “Hubble” popular. I think that another reason is the catchy name.
The “Hubble Space Telescope” (HST) was named after Edwin Powell Hubble, a US-american astronomer who discovered that Galaxies move away faster from us the farther they are away from us (i.e. the expansion of the universe). Of course it is a bit of luck that this important astronomer also had such a catchy name that suited well to name a telescope after him. If we dig a bit into European history of ...




