The dome for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), which will house the world’s most advanced solar telescope when it is finished, is now ready. Designed by engineering firm IDOM under contract from the US National Solar Observatory, it was built by a group of Spanish companies.

The new telescope, which will be the largest since Galileo, will observe the Sun from its position on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Located at the Haleakala Observatory in Haleakala National Park, it will be positioned at an altitude of 3,000 meters. The dome, or enclosure, for the telescope, was built at a cost of €3.5 million by Spanish capital goods manufacturers Gometegui and Hilfa. Also participating in this process were the companies Talleres Aratz, Mondragón Sistemas, Emetal and Strunor.

The project was led by Spanish engineering firm IDOM under contract from the US National Solar Observatory.

IDOM designed the dome from 2010 to 2011 for the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA).

The dome was constructed in northern Spain’s Basque Country region, in the town of Basauri. One of its unique characteristics is that it can position the aperture with millimetric precision. Shortly it will be disassembled for transport to Hawaii in the US, where it will be installed by the end of 2015.

Domes on conventional telescopes are stationary, while the telescope itself moves to observe a star. This dome however follows the telescope in very slow movements that are practically imperceptible, something that other telescopes can’t do. With a diameter of 26 meters, 24 meters in height and weighing 600 tons, the housing will enclose a telescope that can detect details on the Sun’s surface of only 30 kilometers in size.