The Gran Telescopic, who made his first experimental observations in 2007 with half the capacity, now opened, receives the light coming from space in its gigantic reflector mirror, segmented by 36 hexagonal pieces of glass and ceramic, totally controlled by a newly -developed control system called active-optics’s, which makes all the pieces work together as a single glass reflector. These pieces are 1.90 m between the vertices’s, thickness of 8 cm and weight of 470 kg each.

With the quality of optical equipment, the GTC has a power of vision and brightness equivalent to four million human eyes and can accurately distinguish the headlights of a car located twenty thousand kilometers from the observation point, the one that separates Spain from Australia