The world's most powerful optical telescope is now operating at full power, releasing its first images of a spiral galaxy some 100 million light years away.

The $120 million US Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), located 3,200 metres above sea level atop southeastern Arizona's Mount Graham, uses two massive 8.4-metre-diameter mirrors side by side to produce a resolution equivalent to a 22.8-metre telescope.

A false colour image taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, Ariz., showing the spiral galaxy NGC 2770, some 102 million light years away.
(Large Binocular Camera team, Rome Observatory)

That gives the telescope the ability to see into the heavens with 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, according to LBT Corp., a collaboration of U.S., Italian and German universities and research institutes.

"The images that this telescope will produce will be like none seen before; the power and clarity of this machine is in a class of its own," said Peter Strittmatter, the president of LBT Corp., in a statement.

"We will now have the ability to peer into history, seeing the birth stars, galaxies and possibly even the origins of the universe."

Strittmatter said that while there are other larger telescopes looking in other parts of the light spectrum — such as low-frequency radio waves — the LBT is the most powerful telescope looking at visible light.

The launch of the LBT comes as astronomers around the world are working on a number of ground-based super-sized observatories with equally literal names such as the Giant Magellan Project, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope.

But none of these projects is scheduled to be completed for at least eight years.

The Giant Magellan Telescope, to be located in Las Campanas, Chile, and equipped with a 24-metre-diameter mirror, is the closest to being finished, with a scheduled completion date of around 2016.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, a joint project of the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California is aiming to complete its telescope by 2018. A site has yet to be chosen. The cost of the project is about $780 million US.

The European Extremely Large Telescope is also aiming for completion in 2018.