It is not just a remarkable feat of engineering, but also a beautiful one. The 18 hexagonal mirrors made from gold-plated beryllium inspired a replica to hang on the wall of the cellar nerd.
The first images were captured last week, but the telescope has been in development for more than a decade, with a major redesign happening in 2005. The mirror array of the telescope is 21 feet across, making it six times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Cellar Nerd's reproduction is less ambitious and will give us more insight into the origins of our universe. It costs less than $10 billion to build.
The Cellar Nerd used gold-tinted mirrors from Amazon and had to wait until they arrived to design and build a frame to mount them to. Instead of using a 3D printer, the Cellar Nerd used a jigsaw and a slab of plywood to build the frame.
To add to an ever-growing slideshow, the Cellar Nerd plans to update the mirror to automatically retrieve new images from the telescope as they are shared online.
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