Austrian ELT Workshop

First light on the ELT is nominally three years away. Time is ticking for us to start thinking about how to best use the ELT. The Austrian Academy of Science is financing a series of 5 yearly meetings leading up to first light. The main aim is to bring together the future ELT community and to help build the science cases and proposals that will shape the ELT’s initial observing periods. A key goal of the meeting is to connect the instrument builders with the future users of the ELT, in order to educate the community for how to best make use of these instruments once they are on-sky.

This three-day meeting aims to cover numerous discussions on early ELT science topics across instruments, as well as simulated observations that guide observing strategies. The meeting will complement traditional scientific presentations with a simulation hackathons in the afternoons.

For 2026, the scientific focus is on science and simulations at the edge of the sensitivity limits enabled by the large collecting power of the ELT’s 40m mirror.