It’s with great sadness that I report that my sources tell me that Europe’s rather coolly named "OverWhelmingly Large Telescope" or OWL is not to be. Apparently the project got scrapped today. The idea was to built the absolute largest optical telescope on the planet (100M) and since they called their previous best the Very Large Telescope (VLT) despite it ‘only’ being 16m (and the largest in the world) they thought it would be funny to pull the piss out of themselves and call this proposed telescope OverWhelmingly large!

All in all a sad day for funny TLAs and of course European Astronomy.