The Spotlights take eight observatories apart, from the science case to the data center
Every Spotlight starts with what the observatory sees, then walks the machine one subsystem at a time: optics or antennas, detectors and receivers, mounts and drives, cryogenics, timing, fiber, the correlator or data center, and the pipeline with the AI inside it. Each subsystem has its own supplier table, and each observatory on the ground ends with how to visit. The Event Horizon Telescope, an array of existing telescopes, gets a supplier table on its own page instead.
Spotlight
Vera C. Rubin Observatory
The optical survey machine: three mirrors on two pieces of glass, a 3.2-gigapixel camera of 189 CCDs, a Spanish mount and a fiber chain to SLAC, with a neural network screening every alert.
Spotlight
ALMA
The millimeter array: 66 antennas from three industrial partners, 10 receiver bands in 4 K cryostats, and a correlator at 5,000 m now being replaced by the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade.
Spotlight
FAST Radio Telescope
The giant single dish: a 500 m cable net reshaped by 2,225 actuators, a feed cabin flown by six cables, and a data chain from ROACH2 boards to Inspur storage, with imported parts now being replaced by Chinese ones.
Spotlight
Extremely Large Telescope
The biggest optical telescope ever built: 798 mirror segments held to about 2 nm, an adaptive mirror of more than 5,000 actuators, and a dome and structure from an Italian consortium, with first light set for March 2029.
Spotlight
Giant Magellan Telescope
Seven 8.4 m mirrors from the Arizona Mirror Lab, seven adaptive secondaries with 4,725 actuators from AdOptica, and a mount built by Ingersoll in Illinois, waiting on NSF for construction money.
Spotlight
W. M. Keck Observatory
The segmented-mirror pioneer: two 10 m primaries of 36 Zerodur hexagons held to 4 nm, laser guide stars from TOPTICA, a GPU adaptive-optics controller from Microgate, and a summit lease now passing to a new state authority.
Spotlight
SKA-Mid and MeerKAT
The growing radio array: 133 Chinese-built 15 m dishes joining the 64 of MeerKAT on the Karoo, receivers from Sweden, South Africa and Germany, a Canadian correlator and French supercomputers, with the first dishes already making fringes.
Spotlight
Xuntian Space Telescope
China's survey space telescope: 2 m off-axis optics from CIOMP, a camera of 30 CCDs split between CETC 44 and Teledyne e2v, five instruments made in China, and servicing at the Tiangong space station, with launch set for 2027.
Supplier table
Event Horizon Telescope
An array of existing telescopes rather than one machine, so it has a supplier table instead of a Spotlight: the masers, receivers, FPGA back ends, recorders and correlator clusters added to its stations, from 26 named suppliers.
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Suppliers in 25 countries build the Spotlight observatories and the Event Horizon Telescope
Count of named suppliers by country for each observatory; a supplier with sites in two countries counts in both. Where a source names an organization but not its country, or names no maker at all, it stays off this table; those parts are marked on each Spotlight page.
| Supplier country | Rubin | ALMA | FAST | ELT | GMT | Keck | SKA-Mid | Xuntian | EHT | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US | 15 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 12 | 12 | 1 | - | 14 | 56 |
| Germany | 3 | 3 | 2 | 9 | 2 | 4 | 5 | - | 2 | 24 |
| China | - | - | 6 | - | - | - | 1 | 10 | - | 17 |
| France | 3 | 3 | - | 6 | 1 | 3 | 1 | - | 1 | 16 |
| Italy | 3 | 2 | - | 9 | 5 | 1 | - | - | - | 15 |
| Spain | 4 | - | - | 5 | 1 | - | 5 | - | - | 14 |
| South Africa | - | - | - | - | - | - | 10 | - | - | 10 |
| Canada | - | 2 | - | - | 2 | 1 | 4 | - | - | 9 |
| Sweden | 1 | 2 | - | 2 | - | - | 4 | - | - | 9 |
| UK | 3 | 1 | - | 3 | - | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 9 |
| Japan | - | 3 | - | - | 1 | 1 | - | - | 3 | 8 |
| Australia | - | - | 2 | - | - | 3 | 1 | - | - | 6 |
| Netherlands | - | 3 | - | 3 | - | - | 1 | - | - | 6 |
| Chile | 2 | - | - | 2 | - | - | - | - | - | 4 |
| Switzerland | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | 2 | 3 |
| Poland | - | - | - | 2 | - | - | - | - | - | 2 |
| South Korea | - | - | - | - | 2 | - | - | - | - | 2 |
| Belgium | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | 1 |
| Brazil | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 1 |
| Finland | - | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | 1 |
| Hong Kong | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
| Hungary | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | 1 |
| Israel | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
| Portugal | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | 1 |
| Taiwan | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
More observatories to visit and follow
All observatories
Public and research observatories in every US state and around the world.
Radio telescopes
The big dishes and arrays, several with visitor centers.
Observatories in Chile
Rubin, ALMA, the ELT, the GMT and the other telescopes of the Atacama and Coquimbo.
Observatories in China
FAST and the other research and public observatories in China.
Largest optical telescopes
Keck, the GTC, the LBT and the extremely large telescopes being built.
Largest radio telescopes
FAST, the Green Bank Telescope and the arrays from ALMA to SKA-Mid.