Big Science needs big names. Here are some of the names of existing and planned telescopes: There’s the Very Large Telescope and Very Large Array, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), the now scrapped plan for an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) and of course El Gran Telescopio in the Canary Islands.

Some of those might be renamed
later, but I like to think at some point they’ll have to become more imaginative with adjectives. Where are the Ridiculously Large Telescope (RLT) or the It’s So Big It’s Almost Embarrassing Telescope (ISBIAET)? I bet they’d get loads of funding.