Uttarakhand unveils Asia's largest liquid mirror telescope.
Asia's largest 4-metre International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) was inaugurated at Devasthal in Uttarakhand, India. The telescope is located at an altitude of 2,450 metres and is designed to survey the strip of the sky passing overhead each night, allowing it to detect transient or variable celestial objects such as supernovae, gravitational lenses, space debris, and asteroids. The ILMT is the first liquid mirror telescope designed exclusively for astronomical observations and is the largest aperture telescope available in the country at present. The wealth of ILMT generated data will permit the application of big data and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms that will be implemented for classifying the objects observed with the ILMT.