Cleaning this giant "eye" is anything but a pedestrian task. The job was the last one performed by Corning technicians in New York state before they shipped the mirror blank to Paris for grinding and polishing, in preparation for the eight-meter-diameter mirror's use in one of the world's largest telescopes.

The work is part of the international $176 million Gemini Project, which plans to finish constructing two identical telescopes on mountaintops in the Northern and Southern hemispheres-Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and Cerro Pachon, Chile-by 1998 and 2000, respectively. Designed to detect infrared wavelengths of light, a method that produces clear extraterrestrial images, the scopes will let researchers try to discover planetary systems and more distant stellar birthplaces and galaxies, says Matt Mountain, director of the Gemini Project. The latter work should enable astronomers to track the history of stars' and galaxies' formation.