"Imagine being able to examine a carton of eggs in a grocery store in Vancouver without leaving your home in Montreal. That's basically the precision the E-ELT observatory will be able to measure. It's main mirror of about 39 metres in diameter (about the height of the Statue of Liberty) makes it the largest observatory ever built. The instruments of this observatory will allow us to observe the chemical traces of potential living beings on planets located several light-years away from Earth. This is possible thanks to the combination of images taken at ultra-high resolution and instruments that allow us to break down distant light into its different components (its different "colors", so to speak). My job is to recreate this observatory in detail using a digital model in a computer, so that we can get an idea of the final scientific capabilities of the observatory before it goes live, scheduled for 2030."