This area is equivalent to an 11.8-meter (460 in) circular aperture, which would be greater than any other single telescope, but it is not comparable in many respects since the light is collected at a lower diffraction limit and is not combined in the same way.

Environmentalists and members of the tribe filed some forty lawsuits – eight of which went before a federal appeals court – but the project ultimately prevailed after an act of the United States Congress.

[citation needed] The telescope and mountain observatory survived two major forest fires in thirteen years, the more recent in the summer of 2017.

The galaxy has a flat disk of stars and glowing gas tipped slightly toward Earth's line of sight.

The first image taken combined ultraviolet and green light, and emphasizes the clumpy regions of newly formed hot stars in the spiral arms.

The second image combined two deep red colors to highlight the smoother distribution of older, cooler stars.

The third image was a composite of ultraviolet, green and deep red light and shows the detailed structure of hot, moderate and cool stars in the galaxy.

LUCI operates in the 0.9–2.5 μm spectral range using a 2048 x 2048 element Hawaii-2RG detector array from Teledyne and provides imaging and spectroscopic capabilities in seeing- and diffraction-limited modes.

Three camera optics with numerical apertures of 1.8, 3.75 and 30 provide image scales of 0.25, 0.12, and 0.015 arcsec/detector element for wide field, seeing-limited and diffraction-limited observations.

LUCI is operated at cryogenic temperatures, and is therefore enclosed in a cryostat of 1.6 m diameter and 1.6 m height, and cooled to about −200 °C by two closed-cycle coolers.