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English: Comparison of nominal sizes of primary mirrors of notable optical reflecting telescopes, and a few other objects. Dotted lines show sizes of round mirrors that would have had equivalent light-gathering ability.

The telescopes shown on this comparison chart are listed below, ordered in each sub-section by (effective) mirror/lens area, low to high, and then by actual/planned first light date, old to new. The "present-day" status is given as of the beginning of 2024. See also List of largest optical reflecting telescopes.

Largest refractors (for comparison):

1) Yerkes Observatory's 40-inch (1.02 m) refractor, 1893 (largest refractor consistently used for scientific observations)
2) Great Paris Exhibition Telescope, 49 inches (1.24 m), 1900 (largest refractor ever built; had practically no scientific usage)

Ground-based reflectors:

3) Hooker Telescope, 100 inches (2.54 m), 1917; world's largest telescope from 1917 to 1949
4) Multiple Mirror Telescope, 186 inches (4.72 m) effective, 1979–1998; 6.5 m, from 1998
5) LAMOST (Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope), 4.9 m effective at best, 2009
6) Hale Telescope, 200 inches (5.1 m), 1949; world's largest telescope from 1949 to 1975
7) BTA-6, 6 m, 1975; world's largest telescope from 1975 to 1990 (when it was surpassed by the partially-completed Keck I telescope)
8) Large Zenith Telescope, 6 m, 2003; largest liquid-mirror telescope ever built; decommissioned in 2019
9) Magellan Telescopes, two 6.5‑m individual telescopes, 2000 and 2002;
10) Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), 6.68 m effective (8.4‑m mirror, but with a big hole in the middle), planned 2025
11) Gemini Observatory, 8.1 m, 1999 and 2001
12) Subaru Telescope, 8.2 m, 1999; largest monolithic (i.e. non-segmented) mirror in an optical telescope from 1999 to 2005
13) Southern African Large Telescope, 9.2 m effective, 2005 (largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere)
14) Hobby–Eberly Telescope, 10 m effective, 1996
15) Gran Telescopio Canarias, 10.4 m, 2007 (world's largest single-aperture optical telescope)
16) Large Binocular Telescope, 11.8 m effective (two 8.4‑m telescopes on a common mount), 2005 and 2006; each individual telescope has the largest monolithic (i.e. non-segmented) mirror in an optical telescope, while the combined effective light collecting area is the largest for any optical telescope in non-interferometric mode
17) Keck Telescopes, 14 m effective (two 10‑m individual telescopes), 1993 and 1996; similarly to VLT, the two telescopes were combined only for interferometric observations rather than to simply achieve larger light collecting area; furthermore, this mode has been discontinued
18) Very Large Telescope, 16.4 m effective (four 8.2 m individual telescopes), 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2000; total effective light collecting area would have been world's largest for any present-day optical telescope, but the instrumentation required to obtain a combined incoherent focus was not built
19) Giant Magellan Telescope, 22.0 m effective, planned for early 2030s
20) Thirty Meter Telescope, 30 m effective, planned (no specific dates yet)
21) Extremely Large Telescope, 39.3 m effective, planned 2028
22) Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, 100 m, cancelled

Space telescopes:

23) Gaia, 1.45 m × 0.5 m (area equivalent to a 0.96‑m round mirror), 2013
24) Kepler, 1.4 m, 2009
25) Hubble Space Telescope, 2.4 m, 1990
26) James Webb Space Telescope, 6.5 m effective, 2022 (largest space optical telescope to date)

Radio telescopes for comparison:

27) Arecibo Observatory's 305‑m dish; largest fully-filled single-aperture telescope from 1963 to 2016 (the largest-aperture telescope of any kind is the very-sparsely-filled RATAN-600 radio telescope)
28) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical [radio] Telescope (FAST), 500‑m dish (effective aperture of ≈300 m), 2016; world's largest fully-filled single-aperture telescope (since 2016)

Other objects for comparison:

29) Human height, 1.77 m on average
30) Tennis court, 78 × 36 ft (23.77 × 10.97 m)
31) Basketball court, 94 × 50 ft (28.7 × 15.2 m)
Source Own work
Author Cmglee; data on holes in mirrors provided by an anonymous user from IP 71.41.210.146
Other versions
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=en (English)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=he (Hebrew)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=pl (Polish)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=ru (Russian)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=sl (Slovenian)
Comparison optical telescope primary mirrors.svg|lang=zh (Chinese)

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current09:37, 23 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 09:37, 23 February 2024512 × 536 (168 KB)DmitTrixremoved outline on scale’s components, fixed units alignment, added Chinese for units; restored more numeric character references for invisible/indistinguishable characters (such as RTL marks, non-breaking spaces/hyphens); fixed Slovenian where "mirror" was wrongly used instead of "lens"; slightly expanded refractor telescopes’ descriptions in most langs;fixed Tennis court’s text position for Chinese
23:04, 22 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 23:04, 22 February 2024512 × 536 (167 KB)DmitTrixUpdated Arecibo text in multiple languages to have same info and to fit better; +Polish for Owerwhelmingly Large Telescope; aligned date to English text in all langs for Giant Magellan Telescope; fixed issues with subscript "2" in Gaia and James Webb in all langs; better arrangement of texts for these two and for Hubble in Polish and Slovenian; aligned Tennis court's text to left to mirror Basketball's court alignment
23:05, 21 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 23:05, 21 February 2024512 × 536 (169 KB)DmitTrixfixed scale’s units being too close to the numbers; added Arecibo years in all languages; restored some numeric character references for editability; work in progress
14:42, 21 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 14:42, 21 February 2024512 × 536 (169 KB)AhechtMore Arecibo updates // Editing SVG source code using c:User:Rillke/SVGedit.js
14:40, 21 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 14:40, 21 February 2024512 × 536 (169 KB)AhechtMore Arecibo updates // Editing SVG source code using c:User:Rillke/SVGedit.js
14:34, 21 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 14:34, 21 February 2024512 × 536 (169 KB)AhechtAdd (1963-2020) to Arecibo // Editing SVG source code using c:User:Rillke/SVGedit.js
14:29, 21 February 2024Thumbnail for version as of 14:29, 21 February 2024512 × 536 (169 KB)AhechtUpdate JWST, GMT, TMT, ELT, and Rubin // Editing SVG source code using c:User:Rillke/SVGedit.js
16:14, 8 August 2022Thumbnail for version as of 16:14, 8 August 2022512 × 536 (169 KB)AhechtELT is now planned for 2027, Rubin now planned for 2024 // Editing SVG source code using c:User:Rillke/SVGedit.js
20:25, 17 January 2022Thumbnail for version as of 20:25, 17 January 2022512 × 536 (169 KB)CmgleeUpdate JWST and basketball court as per user_talk:cmglee#File:Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg // Editing SVG source code using c:User:Rillke/SVGedit.js
23:38, 6 March 2021Thumbnail for version as of 23:38, 6 March 2021512 × 536 (169 KB)JoKalliauer1) phab:T276684 Gran and Keck (first line) show up; 2) phab:T11420 on commons english text2path will replace the textPath-switch
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