Eyes to the skies getting bigger and bigger

The managers of these projects are fairly confident they will get the money they need to complete their grand visions. However, some astronomers worry that there may not be enough private or government money for all of them, so they find themselves competing for funding, even as they cheer each other on.

If completed, ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope would be the biggest of the new observatories and should be able to see 20 to 100 times more sharply than the current best land-based telescopes. The Hubble, which set the standard for stunning astronomical pictures, will seem less amazing.

"Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet," said 2006 Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Mather, senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The $4.5 billion Webb Telescope, designed to travel 900,000 miles beyond Earth's orbit, is not faced with the atmospheric distortion of ground telescopes. Still, it will use its own version of adaptive optics. Because of temperature fluctuations in the cold of space, the telescope will have to adjust the shape of its mirrors automatically. Webb's mirror, which is 2 1/2 times bigger than Hubble's, has 18 segments.

While places like Arizona and Hawaii have been successful sites for high-quality space images, Chile is the focal point of the next-generation building boom.

Slide show   Month in Space: Sky highlights Feast your eyes on eclipses, northern lights and other out-of-this-world sights from August 2008. more photos

Both the Thirty Meter and European telescope are looking at several sites there although the Thirty Meter team is also considering Baja, Mexico, and Hawaii. What's needed is the right combination of atmospheric conditions, weather, high altitude, prevailing winds and dark skies.

But there is more in the works than just the super-sized scopes. Smaller, more specialized telescopes are in various stages of design and construction.

The $400 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be built in Chile by 2014 would survey the sky, constantly shooting a movie of 20 billion objects in the cosmos and spotting targets for bigger telescopes.

A planned project in Hawaii would be on the lookout for "killer asteroids." And in Chile, dozens of high-precision antennas are being erected for a huge radio astronomy observatory, called ALMA, that would look into the universe in a different way.

It is the biggest observatories in the works, however, that will provide the dramatic change in astronomical pictures. The pictures to come, Nelson said of the Thirty Meter project, will "knock your socks off, faint stuff that Hubble can't see."

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