And here I'm sitting with my 8" Schmidt Camera and 12" Newton … the amount of engineering that goes into this is incredible. It's not just the mirror, which is

And here I'm sitting with my 8" Schmidt Camera and 12" Newton … the amount of engineering that goes into this is incredible. It's not just the mirror, which is of course important, but also having a mount that can precisely track at the sidereal rate with all the mirrors on it. And then, judging by the image, they'll also do Laser Adaptive Optics to correct for atmospheric seeing artifacts, which means adjusting the mirrors and/or camera at a very high rate and /very/ precisely. It basically works by painting and artificial star in the sky with a high powered laser, and by measuring the difference between where it should be and where it actually is, you can then adjust the optical train to compensate. And, then there's the issue with temperature compensation, collimation (looks like a Gregorian-type design), and of course the cameras themselves. For the cameras I'm assuming the illuminated field is quite large, so either this means a HUGE CCD, or stapling several together with all sorts of noise artifacts involved. Very exciting. Very hard.