Just saw this xkcd being pointed to by ESO today: xkcd Telescope names.

The Very Large Telescope is a project I was lucky enough to help bring from its infancy to daily operations. In the crowd of engineers who worked on that project, Daniel Enard was considered by most as …

The night was clear, we would not be playing Bomberman in the VLT control room that night. Clear skies and a sub-arcsecond seeing meant we would have a full batch of data to process every hour or so until the next morning. Once the calibrations had finished, the telescope operator …